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Jul 22

Encrypted Large Model Inference: The Equivariant Encryption Paradigm

Large scale deep learning model, such as modern language models and diffusion architectures, have revolutionized applications ranging from natural language processing to computer vision. However, their deployment in distributed or decentralized environments raises significant privacy concerns, as sensitive data may be exposed during inference. Traditional techniques like secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, and differential privacy offer partial remedies but often incur substantial computational overhead, latency penalties, or limited compatibility with non-linear network operations. In this work, we introduce Equivariant Encryption (EE), a novel paradigm designed to enable secure, "blind" inference on encrypted data with near zero performance overhead. Unlike fully homomorphic approaches that encrypt the entire computational graph, EE selectively obfuscates critical internal representations within neural network layers while preserving the exact functionality of both linear and a prescribed set of non-linear operations. This targeted encryption ensures that raw inputs, intermediate activations, and outputs remain confidential, even when processed on untrusted infrastructure. We detail the theoretical foundations of EE, compare its performance and integration complexity against conventional privacy preserving techniques, and demonstrate its applicability across a range of architectures, from convolutional networks to large language models. Furthermore, our work provides a comprehensive threat analysis, outlining potential attack vectors and baseline strategies, and benchmarks EE against standard inference pipelines in decentralized settings. The results confirm that EE maintains high fidelity and throughput, effectively bridging the gap between robust data confidentiality and the stringent efficiency requirements of modern, large scale model inference.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 2, 2025

Equivariant Differentially Private Deep Learning: Why DP-SGD Needs Sparser Models

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) limits the amount of private information deep learning models can memorize during training. This is achieved by clipping and adding noise to the model's gradients, and thus networks with more parameters require proportionally stronger perturbation. As a result, large models have difficulties learning useful information, rendering training with DP-SGD exceedingly difficult on more challenging training tasks. Recent research has focused on combating this challenge through training adaptations such as heavy data augmentation and large batch sizes. However, these techniques further increase the computational overhead of DP-SGD and reduce its practical applicability. In this work, we propose using the principle of sparse model design to solve precisely such complex tasks with fewer parameters, higher accuracy, and in less time, thus serving as a promising direction for DP-SGD. We achieve such sparsity by design by introducing equivariant convolutional networks for model training with Differential Privacy. Using equivariant networks, we show that small and efficient architecture design can outperform current state-of-the-art models with substantially lower computational requirements. On CIFAR-10, we achieve an increase of up to 9% in accuracy while reducing the computation time by more than 85%. Our results are a step towards efficient model architectures that make optimal use of their parameters and bridge the privacy-utility gap between private and non-private deep learning for computer vision.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 30, 2023

Enabling Efficient Equivariant Operations in the Fourier Basis via Gaunt Tensor Products

Developing equivariant neural networks for the E(3) group plays an important role in modeling 3D data across real-world applications. Enforcing this equivariance primarily involves the tensor products of irreducible representations (irreps). However, the computational complexity of such operations increases significantly as higher-order tensors are used. In this work, we propose a systematic approach to substantially accelerate the computation of the tensor products of irreps. We mathematically connect the commonly used Clebsch-Gordan coefficients to the Gaunt coefficients, which are integrals of products of three spherical harmonics. Through Gaunt coefficients, the tensor product of irreps becomes equivalent to the multiplication between spherical functions represented by spherical harmonics. This perspective further allows us to change the basis for the equivariant operations from spherical harmonics to a 2D Fourier basis. Consequently, the multiplication between spherical functions represented by a 2D Fourier basis can be efficiently computed via the convolution theorem and Fast Fourier Transforms. This transformation reduces the complexity of full tensor products of irreps from O(L^6) to O(L^3), where L is the max degree of irreps. Leveraging this approach, we introduce the Gaunt Tensor Product, which serves as a new method to construct efficient equivariant operations across different model architectures. Our experiments on the Open Catalyst Project and 3BPA datasets demonstrate both the increased efficiency and improved performance of our approach.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 18, 2024

EinHops: Einsum Notation for Expressive Homomorphic Operations on RNS-CKKS Tensors

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an encryption scheme that allows for computation to be performed directly on encrypted data, effectively closing the loop on secure and outsourced computing. Data is encrypted not only during rest and transit, but also during processing. However, FHE provides a limited instruction set: SIMD addition, SIMD multiplication, and cyclic rotation of 1-D vectors. This restriction makes performing multi-dimensional tensor operations challenging. Practitioners must pack these tensors into 1-D vectors and map tensor operations onto this one-dimensional layout rather than their traditional nested structure. And while prior systems have made significant strides in automating this process, they often hide critical packing decisions behind layers of abstraction, making debugging, optimizing, and building on top of these systems difficult. In this work, we approach multi-dimensional tensor operations in FHE through Einstein summation (einsum) notation. Einsum notation explicitly encodes dimensional structure and operations in its syntax, naturally exposing how tensors should be packed and transformed. We decompose einsum expressions into a fixed set of FHE-friendly operations. We implement our design and present EinHops, a minimalist system that factors einsum expressions into a fixed sequence of FHE operations. EinHops enables developers to perform encrypted tensor operations using FHE while maintaining full visibility into the underlying packing strategy. We evaluate EinHops on a range of tensor operations from a simple transpose to complex multi-dimensional contractions. We show that the explicit nature of einsum notation allows us to build an FHE tensor system that is simple, general, and interpretable. We open-source EinHops at the following repository: https://github.com/baahl-nyu/einhops.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 10, 2025

The Price of Freedom: Exploring Expressivity and Runtime Tradeoffs in Equivariant Tensor Products

E(3)-equivariant neural networks have demonstrated success across a wide range of 3D modelling tasks. A fundamental operation in these networks is the tensor product, which interacts two geometric features in an equivariant manner to create new features. Due to the high computational complexity of the tensor product, significant effort has been invested to optimize the runtime of this operation. For example, Luo et al. (2024) recently proposed the Gaunt tensor product (GTP) which promises a significant speedup. In this work, we provide a careful, systematic analysis of a number of tensor product operations. In particular, we emphasize that different tensor products are not performing the same operation. The reported speedups typically come at the cost of expressivity. We introduce measures of expressivity and interactability to characterize these differences. In addition, we realized the original implementation of GTP can be greatly simplified by directly using a spherical grid at no cost in asymptotic runtime. This spherical grid approach is faster on our benchmarks and in actual training of the MACE interatomic potential by 30%. Finally, we provide the first systematic microbenchmarks of the various tensor product operations. We find that the theoretical runtime guarantees can differ wildly from empirical performance, demonstrating the need for careful application-specific benchmarking. Code is available at https://github.com/atomicarchitects/PriceofFreedom.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

EquiformerV3: Scaling Efficient, Expressive, and General SE(3)-Equivariant Graph Attention Transformers

As SE(3)-equivariant graph neural networks mature as a core tool for 3D atomistic modeling, improving their efficiency, expressivity, and physical consistency has become a central challenge for large-scale applications. In this work, we introduce EquiformerV3, the third generation of the SE(3)-equivariant graph attention Transformer, designed to advance all three dimensions: efficiency, expressivity, and generality. Building on EquiformerV2, we have the following three key advances. First, we optimize the software implementation, achieving 1.75times speedup. Second, we introduce simple and effective modifications to EquiformerV2, including equivariant merged layer normalization, improved feedforward network hyper-parameters, and attention with smooth radius cutoff. Third, we propose SwiGLU-S^2 activations to incorporate many-body interactions for better theoretical expressivity and to preserve strict equivariance while reducing the complexity of sampling S^2 grids. Together, SwiGLU-S^2 activations and smooth-cutoff attention enable accurate modeling of smoothly varying potential energy surfaces (PES), generalizing EquiformerV3 to tasks requiring energy-conserving simulations and higher-order derivatives of PES. With these improvements, EquiformerV3 trained with the auxiliary task of denoising non-equilibrium structures (DeNS) achieves state-of-the-art results on OC20, OMat24, and Matbench Discovery.

Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography

We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving certain goals necessitates sharing private data. Traditionally, addressing this challenge has involved either seeking trusted intermediaries or constructing cryptographic protocols that restrict how much data is revealed, such as multi-party computations or zero-knowledge proofs. While significant advances have been made in scaling cryptographic approaches, they remain limited in terms of the size and complexity of applications they can be used for. In this paper, we argue that capable machine learning models can fulfill the role of a trusted third party, thus enabling secure computations for applications that were previously infeasible. In particular, we describe Trusted Capable Model Environments (TCMEs) as an alternative approach for scaling secure computation, where capable machine learning model(s) interact under input/output constraints, with explicit information flow control and explicit statelessness. This approach aims to achieve a balance between privacy and computational efficiency, enabling private inference where classical cryptographic solutions are currently infeasible. We describe a number of use cases that are enabled by TCME, and show that even some simple classic cryptographic problems can already be solved with TCME. Finally, we outline current limitations and discuss the path forward in implementing them.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 15, 2025 2

Regularizing Towards Soft Equivariance Under Mixed Symmetries

Datasets often have their intrinsic symmetries, and particular deep-learning models called equivariant or invariant models have been developed to exploit these symmetries. However, if some or all of these symmetries are only approximate, which frequently happens in practice, these models may be suboptimal due to the architectural restrictions imposed on them. We tackle this issue of approximate symmetries in a setup where symmetries are mixed, i.e., they are symmetries of not single but multiple different types and the degree of approximation varies across these types. Instead of proposing a new architectural restriction as in most of the previous approaches, we present a regularizer-based method for building a model for a dataset with mixed approximate symmetries. The key component of our method is what we call equivariance regularizer for a given type of symmetries, which measures how much a model is equivariant with respect to the symmetries of the type. Our method is trained with these regularizers, one per each symmetry type, and the strength of the regularizers is automatically tuned during training, leading to the discovery of the approximation levels of some candidate symmetry types without explicit supervision. Using synthetic function approximation and motion forecasting tasks, we demonstrate that our method achieves better accuracy than prior approaches while discovering the approximate symmetry levels correctly.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 1, 2023

Self-supervised learning of Split Invariant Equivariant representations

Recent progress has been made towards learning invariant or equivariant representations with self-supervised learning. While invariant methods are evaluated on large scale datasets, equivariant ones are evaluated in smaller, more controlled, settings. We aim at bridging the gap between the two in order to learn more diverse representations that are suitable for a wide range of tasks. We start by introducing a dataset called 3DIEBench, consisting of renderings from 3D models over 55 classes and more than 2.5 million images where we have full control on the transformations applied to the objects. We further introduce a predictor architecture based on hypernetworks to learn equivariant representations with no possible collapse to invariance. We introduce SIE (Split Invariant-Equivariant) which combines the hypernetwork-based predictor with representations split in two parts, one invariant, the other equivariant, to learn richer representations. We demonstrate significant performance gains over existing methods on equivariance related tasks from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view. We further analyze our introduced predictor and show how it steers the learned latent space. We hope that both our introduced dataset and approach will enable learning richer representations without supervision in more complex scenarios. Code and data are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SIE.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 14, 2023

Self-Supervised Learning Based on Transformed Image Reconstruction for Equivariance-Coherent Feature Representation

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have achieved remarkable success in learning image representations allowing invariances in them - but therefore discarding transformation information that some computer vision tasks actually require. While recent approaches attempt to address this limitation by learning equivariant features using linear operators in feature space, they impose restrictive assumptions that constrain flexibility and generalization. We introduce a weaker definition for the transformation relation between image and feature space denoted as equivariance-coherence. We propose a novel SSL auxiliary task that learns equivariance-coherent representations through intermediate transformation reconstruction, which can be integrated with existing joint embedding SSL methods. Our key idea is to reconstruct images at intermediate points along transformation paths, e.g. when training on 30-degree rotations, we reconstruct the 10-degree and 20-degree rotation states. Reconstructing intermediate states requires the transformation information used in augmentations, rather than suppressing it, and therefore fosters features containing the augmented transformation information. Our method decomposes feature vectors into invariant and equivariant parts, training them with standard SSL losses and reconstruction losses, respectively. We demonstrate substantial improvements on synthetic equivariance benchmarks while maintaining competitive performance on downstream tasks requiring invariant representations. The approach seamlessly integrates with existing SSL methods (iBOT, DINOv2) and consistently enhances performance across diverse tasks, including segmentation, detection, depth estimation, and video dense prediction. Our framework provides a practical way for augmenting SSL methods with equivariant capabilities while preserving invariant performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 9

Measuring the Symmetry--Data Exchange Rate

Equivariance theory predicts that an architectural symmetry prior reduces sample complexity by a factor of |G|; this is widely cited but rarely measured as a scaling law with controls that separate the prior from its confounds. On a controlled C_n-symmetric task, we report three findings. First, a wrong-group control with identical orbit size and matched compute is worse than no constraint (joint pairwise CI [+0.79, +3.26] excludes zero, robust across estimators); misaligned constraint is actively harmful, not merely unhelpful. Second, an augmentation baseline equipped with test-time orbit averaging matches the equivariant model exactly -- bit-identical per-epoch validation curves across matched cells -- so the architecture-vs-augmentation gap is conditional on asymmetric test-time computation, not unconditional. Third, the relative exchange rate beta_diff = 1.28 is consistent in sign and order of magnitude with the theoretical 1.0 (single-level CI [+0.92, +2.05]); the more conservative two-level bootstrap (seeds x group sizes) widens this to [-0.63, +1.72], including zero, and a finer-N replication on a sqrt(2)-spaced grid is inconclusive (point estimate -0.82). The methodological contributions -- the relative-rate estimator that cancels the shared-difficulty confound, the wrong-group control, and a pre-specified failure taxonomy -- transfer to any inductive bias whose strength can be parameterised. Honest scoping: the primary estimator beta_diff was adopted post-hoc after the initial analysis revealed a positive-slope identifiability problem; the design was never externally pre-registered; and the headline number rests on an OLS slope over seven group sizes on a coarse N grid. This is an exploratory study, not a confirmatory measurement; the wrong-group result is the cleanest finding and the one we report with the most confidence. A registered replication on fresh seeds is future work.

  • 1 authors
·
May 30 2

DPA4: Pushing the Accuracy-Cost Frontier of Interatomic Potentials with EMFA SO(2) Convolution

Machine-learning interatomic potentials now approach quantum-mechanical accuracy on standard benchmarks, but the training cost of the most expressive equivariant architectures has become a serious bottleneck. We introduce DPA4, an SE(3)-equivariant interatomic-potential architecture with an EMFA (Edge-conditioned, Multi-Focus, Attention) SO(2)-equivariant convolution that combines a low-rank edge-node SO(2)-equivariant product, a multi-focus design for message nonlinearity, and envelope-gated attention for message aggregation. A Lebedev-grid projection further preserves SO(3)-equivariance in the nonlinearity to machine precision. A compiler-friendly conservative energy-gradient training path provides up to sim3 times wall-clock speedup under torch compile. On the compliant Matbench Discovery benchmark, DPA4-Pro attains the best Combined Performance Score (CPS) on the leaderboard, while the 2.76M-parameter DPA4-Air exceeds the accuracy of the 30.1M-parameter eSEN-30M-MP baseline with 10.9times fewer parameters and 42.9times less training compute. On SPICE-MACE-OFF, the 5.4M-parameter DPA4-Plus lowers the aggregate molecular energy and force errors of the 6.5M-parameter eSEN baseline by 29% and 30%, while the 2.7M-parameter DPA4-Air still surpasses that baseline with sim2.4times fewer parameters. Together these results place DPA4 on a new accuracy-cost Pareto frontier on Matbench Discovery and position it as a strong candidate backbone for future multi-task large atomistic model (LAM) pretraining.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 9

Approximately Piecewise E(3) Equivariant Point Networks

Integrating a notion of symmetry into point cloud neural networks is a provably effective way to improve their generalization capability. Of particular interest are E(3) equivariant point cloud networks where Euclidean transformations applied to the inputs are preserved in the outputs. Recent efforts aim to extend networks that are E(3) equivariant, to accommodate inputs made of multiple parts, each of which exhibits local E(3) symmetry. In practical settings, however, the partitioning into individually transforming regions is unknown a priori. Errors in the partition prediction would unavoidably map to errors in respecting the true input symmetry. Past works have proposed different ways to predict the partition, which may exhibit uncontrolled errors in their ability to maintain equivariance to the actual partition. To this end, we introduce APEN: a general framework for constructing approximate piecewise-E(3) equivariant point networks. Our primary insight is that functions that are equivariant with respect to a finer partition will also maintain equivariance in relation to the true partition. Leveraging this observation, we propose a design where the equivariance approximation error at each layers can be bounded solely in terms of (i) uncertainty quantification of the partition prediction, and (ii) bounds on the probability of failing to suggest a proper subpartition of the ground truth one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APEN using two data types exemplifying part-based symmetry: (i) real-world scans of room scenes containing multiple furniture-type objects; and, (ii) human motions, characterized by articulated parts exhibiting rigid movement. Our empirical results demonstrate the advantage of integrating piecewise E(3) symmetry into network design, showing a distinct improvement in generalization compared to prior works for both classification and segmentation tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 13, 2024

Power-Softmax: Towards Secure LLM Inference over Encrypted Data

Modern cryptographic methods for implementing privacy-preserving LLMs such as Homomorphic Encryption (HE) require the LLMs to have a polynomial form. Forming such a representation is challenging because Transformers include non-polynomial components, such as Softmax and layer normalization. Previous approaches have either directly approximated pre-trained models with large-degree polynomials, which are less efficient over HE, or replaced non-polynomial components with easier-to-approximate primitives before training, e.g., Softmax with pointwise attention. The latter approach might introduce scalability challenges. We present a new HE-friendly variant of self-attention that offers a stable form for training and is easy to approximate with polynomials for secure inference. Our work introduces the first polynomial LLMs with 32 layers and over a billion parameters, exceeding the size of previous models by more than tenfold. The resulting models demonstrate reasoning and in-context learning (ICL) capabilities comparable to standard transformers of the same size, representing a breakthrough in the field. Finally, we provide a detailed latency breakdown for each computation over encrypted data, paving the way for further optimization, and explore the differences in inductive bias between transformers relying on our HE-friendly variant and standard transformers. Our code is attached as a supplement.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 12, 2024

Flow Equivariant Recurrent Neural Networks

Data arrives at our senses as a continuous stream, smoothly transforming from one instant to the next. These smooth transformations can be viewed as continuous symmetries of the environment that we inhabit, defining equivalence relations between stimuli over time. In machine learning, neural network architectures that respect symmetries of their data are called equivariant and have provable benefits in terms of generalization ability and sample efficiency. To date, however, equivariance has been considered only for static transformations and feed-forward networks, limiting its applicability to sequence models, such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and corresponding time-parameterized sequence transformations. In this work, we extend equivariant network theory to this regime of `flows' -- one-parameter Lie subgroups capturing natural transformations over time, such as visual motion. We begin by showing that standard RNNs are generally not flow equivariant: their hidden states fail to transform in a geometrically structured manner for moving stimuli. We then show how flow equivariance can be introduced, and demonstrate that these models significantly outperform their non-equivariant counterparts in terms of training speed, length generalization, and velocity generalization, on both next step prediction and sequence classification. We present this work as a first step towards building sequence models that respect the time-parameterized symmetries which govern the world around us.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 19, 2025 1

VectorSmuggle: Steganographic Exfiltration in Embedding Stores and a Cryptographic Provenance Defense

Modern retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems convert sensitive content into high-dimensional embeddings and store them in vector databases that treat the resulting numerical artifacts as opaque. Major vector-store products do not provide native controls for embedding integrity, ingestion-time distributional anomaly detection, or cryptographic provenance attestation. We show this opens a class of steganographic exfiltration attacks: an attacker with write access to the ingestion pipeline can hide payload data inside embeddings using simple post-embedding perturbations (noise injection, rotation, scaling, offset, fragmentation, and combinations thereof) while preserving the surface-level retrieval behavior the RAG system exposes to legitimate users. We evaluate these techniques across a synthetic-PII corpus on text-embedding-3-large, four locally hosted open embedding models, a cross-corpus replication on BEIR NFCorpus and a Quora subset (over 26,000 chunks combined), seven vector-store configurations, an adaptive-attacker variant of the detector evaluation, and a paraphrased-query retrieval benchmark. Distribution-shifting perturbations are often caught by simple anomaly detectors; small-angle orthogonal rotation defeats distribution-based detection across every (model, corpus) pair tested. A disjoint-Givens rotation encoder gives a closed-form per-vector capacity ceiling of floor(d/2) * b bits, but real embedding manifolds impose a capacity-detectability trade-off, and the retrieval-preserving operating point sits well below it. We propose VectorPin, a cryptographic provenance protocol that pins each embedding to its source content and producing model via an Ed25519 signature over a canonical byte representation. Any post-embedding modification breaks signature verification. Embedding-level integrity is a deployable, standardizable control that closes this attack class.

  • 1 authors
·
May 12

Leveraging ASIC AI Chips for Homomorphic Encryption

Cloud-based services are making the outsourcing of sensitive client data increasingly common. Although homomorphic encryption (HE) offers strong privacy guarantee, it requires substantially more resources than computing on plaintext, often leading to unacceptably large latencies in getting the results. HE accelerators have emerged to mitigate this latency issue, but with the high cost of ASICs. In this paper we show that HE primitives can be converted to AI operators and accelerated on existing ASIC AI accelerators, like TPUs, which are already widely deployed in the cloud. Adapting such accelerators for HE requires (1) supporting modular multiplication, (2) high-precision arithmetic in software, and (3) efficient mapping on matrix engines. We introduce the CROSS compiler (1) to adopt Barrett reduction to provide modular reduction support using multiplier and adder, (2) Basis Aligned Transformation (BAT) to convert high-precision multiplication as low-precision matrix-vector multiplication, (3) Matrix Aligned Transformation (MAT) to covert vectorized modular operation with reduction into matrix multiplication that can be efficiently processed on 2D spatial matrix engine. Our evaluation of CROSS on a Google TPUv4 demonstrates significant performance improvements, with up to 161x and 5x speedup compared to the previous work on many-core CPUs and V100. The kernel-level codes are open-sourced at https://github.com/google/jaxite/tree/main/jaxite_word.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 12, 2025

Lie Group Decompositions for Equivariant Neural Networks

Invariance and equivariance to geometrical transformations have proven to be very useful inductive biases when training (convolutional) neural network models, especially in the low-data regime. Much work has focused on the case where the symmetry group employed is compact or abelian, or both. Recent work has explored enlarging the class of transformations used to the case of Lie groups, principally through the use of their Lie algebra, as well as the group exponential and logarithm maps. The applicability of such methods to larger transformation groups is limited by the fact that depending on the group of interest G, the exponential map may not be surjective. Further limitations are encountered when G is neither compact nor abelian. Using the structure and geometry of Lie groups and their homogeneous spaces, we present a framework by which it is possible to work with such groups primarily focusing on the Lie groups G = GL^{+}(n, R) and G = SL(n, R), as well as their representation as affine transformations R^{n} rtimes G. Invariant integration as well as a global parametrization is realized by decomposing the `larger` groups into subgroups and submanifolds which can be handled individually. Under this framework, we show how convolution kernels can be parametrized to build models equivariant with respect to affine transformations. We evaluate the robustness and out-of-distribution generalisation capability of our model on the standard affine-invariant benchmark classification task, where we outperform all previous equivariant models as well as all Capsule Network proposals.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 17, 2023

Tensor Decomposition Networks for Fast Machine Learning Interatomic Potential Computations

SO(3)-equivariant networks are the dominant models for machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). The key operation of such networks is the Clebsch-Gordan (CG) tensor product, which is computationally expensive. To accelerate the computation, we develop tensor decomposition networks (TDNs) as a class of approximately equivariant networks in which CG tensor products are replaced by low-rank tensor decompositions, such as the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition. With the CP decomposition, we prove (i) a uniform bound on the induced error of SO(3)-equivariance, and (ii) the universality of approximating any equivariant bilinear map. To further reduce the number of parameters, we propose path-weight sharing that ties all multiplicity-space weights across the O(L^3) CG paths into a single shared parameter set without compromising equivariance, where L is the maximum angular degree. The resulting layer acts as a plug-and-play replacement for tensor products in existing networks, and the computational complexity of tensor products is reduced from O(L^6) to O(L^4). We evaluate TDNs on PubChemQCR, a newly curated molecular relaxation dataset containing 105 million DFT-calculated snapshots. We also use existing datasets, including OC20, and OC22. Results show that TDNs achieve competitive performance with dramatic speedup in computations. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenMol/TDN{https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/}).

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025

Efficient Privacy-Preserving Retrieval Augmented Generation with Distance-Preserving Encryption

RAG has emerged as a key technique for enhancing response quality of LLMs without high computational cost. In traditional architectures, RAG services are provided by a single entity that hosts the dataset within a trusted local environment. However, individuals or small organizations often lack the resources to maintain data storage servers, leading them to rely on outsourced cloud storage. This dependence on untrusted third-party services introduces privacy risks. Embedding-based retrieval mechanisms, commonly used in RAG systems, are vulnerable to privacy leakage such as vector-to-text reconstruction attacks and structural leakage via vector analysis. Several privacy-preserving RAG techniques have been proposed but most existing approaches rely on partially homomorphic encryption, which incurs substantial computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving RAG framework (ppRAG) tailored for untrusted cloud environments that defends against vector-to-text attack, vector analysis, and query analysis. We propose Conditional Approximate Distance-Comparison-Preserving Symmetric Encryption (CAPRISE) that encrypts embeddings while still allowing the cloud to compute similarity between an encrypted query and the encrypted database embeddings. CAPRISE preserves only the relative distance ordering between the encrypted query and each encrypted database embedding, without exposing inter-database distances, thereby enhancing both privacy and efficiency. To mitigate query analysis, we introduce DP by perturbing the query embedding prior to encryption, preventing the cloud from inferring sensitive patterns. Experimental results show that ppRAG achieves efficient processing throughput, high retrieval accuracy, strong privacy guarantees, making it a practical solution for resource-constrained users seeking secure cloud-augmented LLMs.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 17

EqMotion: Equivariant Multi-agent Motion Prediction with Invariant Interaction Reasoning

Learning to predict agent motions with relationship reasoning is important for many applications. In motion prediction tasks, maintaining motion equivariance under Euclidean geometric transformations and invariance of agent interaction is a critical and fundamental principle. However, such equivariance and invariance properties are overlooked by most existing methods. To fill this gap, we propose EqMotion, an efficient equivariant motion prediction model with invariant interaction reasoning. To achieve motion equivariance, we propose an equivariant geometric feature learning module to learn a Euclidean transformable feature through dedicated designs of equivariant operations. To reason agent's interactions, we propose an invariant interaction reasoning module to achieve a more stable interaction modeling. To further promote more comprehensive motion features, we propose an invariant pattern feature learning module to learn an invariant pattern feature, which cooperates with the equivariant geometric feature to enhance network expressiveness. We conduct experiments for the proposed model on four distinct scenarios: particle dynamics, molecule dynamics, human skeleton motion prediction and pedestrian trajectory prediction. Experimental results show that our method is not only generally applicable, but also achieves state-of-the-art prediction performances on all the four tasks, improving by 24.0/30.1/8.6/9.2%. Code is available at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/EqMotion.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20, 2023

Geometry-aware RL for Manipulation of Varying Shapes and Deformable Objects

Manipulating objects with varying geometries and deformable objects is a major challenge in robotics. Tasks such as insertion with different objects or cloth hanging require precise control and effective modelling of complex dynamics. In this work, we frame this problem through the lens of a heterogeneous graph that comprises smaller sub-graphs, such as actuators and objects, accompanied by different edge types describing their interactions. This graph representation serves as a unified structure for both rigid and deformable objects tasks, and can be extended further to tasks comprising multiple actuators. To evaluate this setup, we present a novel and challenging reinforcement learning benchmark, including rigid insertion of diverse objects, as well as rope and cloth manipulation with multiple end-effectors. These tasks present a large search space, as both the initial and target configurations are uniformly sampled in 3D space. To address this issue, we propose a novel graph-based policy model, dubbed Heterogeneous Equivariant Policy (HEPi), utilizing SE(3) equivariant message passing networks as the main backbone to exploit the geometric symmetry. In addition, by modeling explicit heterogeneity, HEPi can outperform Transformer-based and non-heterogeneous equivariant policies in terms of average returns, sample efficiency, and generalization to unseen objects. Our project page is available at https://thobotics.github.io/hepi.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

Source Known Identifiers: A Three-Tier Identity System for Distributed Applications

Distributed applications need identifiers that satisfy storage efficiency, chronological sortability, origin metadata embedding, zero-lookup verifiability, confidentiality for external consumers, and multi-century addressability. Based on our literature survey, no existing scheme provides all six of these identifier properties within a unified system. This paper introduces Source Known Identifiers (SKIDs), a three-tier identity system that projects a single entity identity across trust boundaries, addressing all six properties. The first tier, Source Known ID (SKID), is a 64-bit signed integer embedding a timestamp with a 250-millisecond precision, application topology, and a per-entity-type sequence counter. It serves as the database primary key, providing compact storage (8 bytes) and natural B-tree ordering for optimized database indexing. The second tier, Source Known Entity ID (SKEID), extends the SKID into a 128-bit Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) compatible value by adding an entity type discriminator, an epoch selector, and a BLAKE3 keyed message authentication code (MAC). SKEIDs enable zero-lookup verification of identifier origin, integrity, and entity type within trusted environments, with a big-endian byte layout that preserves chronological ordering in lexicographic UUID string comparisons. The third tier, Secure SKEID, encrypts the entire SKEID using AES-256 symmetric encryption as a single-block pseudorandom permutation, producing ciphertext indistinguishable from random bytes while remaining compatible with standard UUID data-type parsers in string representation. Deterministic bidirectional transformations connect all three tiers.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 30

Equivariant Eikonal Neural Networks: Grid-Free, Scalable Travel-Time Prediction on Homogeneous Spaces

We introduce Equivariant Neural Eikonal Solvers, a novel framework that integrates Equivariant Neural Fields (ENFs) with Neural Eikonal Solvers. Our approach employs a single neural field where a unified shared backbone is conditioned on signal-specific latent variables - represented as point clouds in a Lie group - to model diverse Eikonal solutions. The ENF integration ensures equivariant mapping from these latent representations to the solution field, delivering three key benefits: enhanced representation efficiency through weight-sharing, robust geometric grounding, and solution steerability. This steerability allows transformations applied to the latent point cloud to induce predictable, geometrically meaningful modifications in the resulting Eikonal solution. By coupling these steerable representations with Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), our framework accurately models Eikonal travel-time solutions while generalizing to arbitrary Riemannian manifolds with regular group actions. This includes homogeneous spaces such as Euclidean, position-orientation, spherical, and hyperbolic manifolds. We validate our approach through applications in seismic travel-time modeling of 2D, 3D, and spherical benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance, scalability, adaptability, and user controllability compared to existing Neural Operator-based Eikonal solver methods.

Symmetry-Compatible Principle for Optimizer Design: Embeddings, LM Heads, SwiGLU MLPs, and MoE Routers

A striking geometric disparity has long persisted in the practice of deep learning. While modern neural network architectures naturally exhibit rich symmetry and equivariance properties, popular optimizers such as Adam and its variants operate inherently coordinate-wise, rendering them unable to respect the equivariance structures of the parameter space. We address this disparity by introducing a symmetry-compatible principle for optimizer design: the gradient update rule should be equivariant under the symmetry group acting on the corresponding weight block. Following this principle, we first provide a unified perspective on bi-orthogonally equivariant updates for general matrix layers, as employed by stochastic spectral descent, Muon, Scion, and polar gradient methods. More importantly, by moving from orthogonal groups to permutation and shared-shift symmetries, we derive symmetry-compatible optimizers for parameter blocks whose symmetries differ from those of general matrix layers: embedding and LM head matrices, SwiGLU MLP projections, and MoE router matrices. These constructions include one-sided spectral, row-norm, hybrid row-norm/spectral, row-aware, column-aware, centered row-norm, and left-spectral updates. They yield an end-to-end layerwise optimizer stack in which each major matrix-valued parameter class is assigned an update whose equivariance matches its symmetry group. We corroborate this principle through pre-training experiments on dense and sparse MoE language models, including Qwen3-0.6B-style, Gemma 3 1B-style, OLMoE-1B-7B-style, and downsized gpt-oss architectures. Across these experiments, symmetry-compatible updates consistently improve final validation loss, and in several cases training stability, over corresponding AdamW updates.

Subgraph Permutation Equivariant Networks

In this work we develop a new method, named Sub-graph Permutation Equivariant Networks (SPEN), which provides a framework for building graph neural networks that operate on sub-graphs, while using a base update function that is permutation equivariant, that are equivariant to a novel choice of automorphism group. Message passing neural networks have been shown to be limited in their expressive power and recent approaches to over come this either lack scalability or require structural information to be encoded into the feature space. The general framework presented here overcomes the scalability issues associated with global permutation equivariance by operating more locally on sub-graphs. In addition, through operating on sub-graphs the expressive power of higher-dimensional global permutation equivariant networks is improved; this is due to fact that two non-distinguishable graphs often contain distinguishable sub-graphs. Furthermore, the proposed framework only requires a choice of k-hops for creating ego-network sub-graphs and a choice of representation space to be used for each layer, which makes the method easily applicable across a range of graph based domains. We experimentally validate the method on a range of graph benchmark classification tasks, demonstrating statistically indistinguishable results from the state-of-the-art on six out of seven benchmarks. Further, we demonstrate that the use of local update functions offers a significant improvement in GPU memory over global methods.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 23, 2021

Protecting Intellectual Property of EEG-based Neural Networks with Watermarking

EEG-based neural networks, pivotal in medical diagnosis and brain-computer interfaces, face significant intellectual property (IP) risks due to their reliance on sensitive neurophysiological data and resource-intensive development. Current watermarking methods, particularly those using abstract trigger sets, lack robust authentication and fail to address the unique challenges of EEG models. This paper introduces a cryptographic wonder filter-based watermarking framework tailored for EEG-based neural networks. Leveraging collision-resistant hashing and public-key encryption, the wonder filter embeds the watermark during training, ensuring minimal distortion (leq 5% drop in EEG task accuracy) and high reliability (100\% watermark detection). The framework is rigorously evaluated against adversarial attacks, including fine-tuning, transfer learning, and neuron pruning. Results demonstrate persistent watermark retention, with classification accuracy for watermarked states remaining above 90\% even after aggressive pruning, while primary task performance degrades faster, deterring removal attempts. Piracy resistance is validated by the inability to embed secondary watermarks without severe accuracy loss ( >10% in EEGNet and CCNN models). Cryptographic hashing ensures authentication, reducing brute-force attack success probabilities. Evaluated on the DEAP dataset across models (CCNN, EEGNet, TSception), the method achieves >99.4% null-embedding accuracy, effectively eliminating false positives. By integrating wonder filters with EEG-specific adaptations, this work bridges a critical gap in IP protection for neurophysiological models, offering a secure, tamper-proof solution for healthcare and biometric applications. The framework's robustness against adversarial modifications underscores its potential to safeguard sensitive EEG models while maintaining diagnostic utility.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 9, 2025

GCVE: A Decentralized Model for Vulnerability Identification, Publication, and Operational Enrichment

The Global CVE initiative (GCVE) proposes a decentralized, open, and extensible model for vulnerability identification, publication, and enrichment. It addresses a gap in today's vulnerability ecosystem: centralized systems provide rigorous control and widely recognized identifiers, while many producers publish advisories independently without a shared fabric for discovery, correlation, enrichment, and reuse. This paper presents GCVE as a socio-technical standardization effort combining autonomous GCVE Numbering Authorities, lightweight allocation rules, distributed publication, open Best Current Practices, and practical reference implementations. The model preserves global uniqueness while allowing participants to publish according to their operational needs. It also broadens the concept of a vulnerability record to cover assignments, disclosures, sightings, rejected identifiers, observations, exploited vulnerability information, and enrichment records. The paper describes how the GCVE BCP process supports technical interoperability and amendable operational practice, including practical guidance for vulnerability handling and disclosure. It also examines the extension mechanism, including AI-oriented extensions, as a way to evolve the standard without centralizing control. A particular focus is placed on vulnerability-lookup as the reference implementation. It aggregates multiple sources, supports GCVE publication and consumption, implements distributed Known Exploited Vulnerability data, and enables automatically enriched vulnerability data streams. Building on lessons from the MISP ecosystem, GCVE frames vulnerability coordination not only as identifier allocation, but as open infrastructure for collective security knowledge production.

  • 1 authors
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May 29

EdgeDetect: Importance-Aware Gradient Compression with Homomorphic Aggregation for Federated Intrusion Detection

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative intrusion detection without raw data exchange, but conventional FL incurs high communication overhead from full-precision gradient transmission and remains vulnerable to gradient inference attacks. This paper presents EdgeDetect, a communication-efficient and privacy-aware federated IDS for bandwidth-constrained 6G-IoT environments. EdgeDetect introduces gradient smartification, a median-based statistical binarization that compresses local updates to {+1,-1} representations, reducing uplink payload by 32times while preserving convergence. We further integrate Paillier homomorphic encryption over binarized gradients, protecting against honest-but-curious servers without exposing individual updates. Experiments on CIC-IDS2017 (2.8M flows, 7 attack classes) demonstrate 98.0% multi-class accuracy and 97.9% macro F1-score, matching centralized baselines, while reducing per-round communication from 450~MB to 14~MB (96.9% reduction). Raspberry Pi-4 deployment confirms edge feasibility: 4.2~MB memory, 0.8~ms latency, and 12~mJ per inference with <0.5% accuracy loss. Under 5% poisoning attacks and severe imbalance, EdgeDetect maintains 87% accuracy and 0.95 minority class F1 (p<0.001), establishing a practical accuracy, communication, and privacy tradeoff for next-generation edge intrusion detection.

Learning Invariant Representations for Equivariant Neural Networks Using Orthogonal Moments

The convolutional layers of standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are equivariant to translation. However, the convolution and fully-connected layers are not equivariant or invariant to other affine geometric transformations. Recently, a new class of CNNs is proposed in which the conventional layers of CNNs are replaced with equivariant convolution, pooling, and batch-normalization layers. The final classification layer in equivariant neural networks is invariant to different affine geometric transformations such as rotation, reflection and translation, and the scalar value is obtained by either eliminating the spatial dimensions of filter responses using convolution and down-sampling throughout the network or average is taken over the filter responses. In this work, we propose to integrate the orthogonal moments which gives the high-order statistics of the function as an effective means for encoding global invariance with respect to rotation, reflection and translation in fully-connected layers. As a result, the intermediate layers of the network become equivariant while the classification layer becomes invariant. The most widely used Zernike, pseudo-Zernike and orthogonal Fourier-Mellin moments are considered for this purpose. The effectiveness of the proposed work is evaluated by integrating the invariant transition and fully-connected layer in the architecture of group-equivariant CNNs (G-CNNs) on rotated MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 22, 2022

ED^4: Explicit Data-level Debiasing for Deepfake Detection

Learning intrinsic bias from limited data has been considered the main reason for the failure of deepfake detection with generalizability. Apart from the discovered content and specific-forgery bias, we reveal a novel spatial bias, where detectors inertly anticipate observing structural forgery clues appearing at the image center, also can lead to the poor generalization of existing methods. We present ED^4, a simple and effective strategy, to address aforementioned biases explicitly at the data level in a unified framework rather than implicit disentanglement via network design. In particular, we develop ClockMix to produce facial structure preserved mixtures with arbitrary samples, which allows the detector to learn from an exponentially extended data distribution with much more diverse identities, backgrounds, local manipulation traces, and the co-occurrence of multiple forgery artifacts. We further propose the Adversarial Spatial Consistency Module (AdvSCM) to prevent extracting features with spatial bias, which adversarially generates spatial-inconsistent images and constrains their extracted feature to be consistent. As a model-agnostic debiasing strategy, ED^4 is plug-and-play: it can be integrated with various deepfake detectors to obtain significant benefits. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority over existing deepfake detection approaches.

  • 7 authors
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Aug 13, 2024

A Gray-box Attack against Latent Diffusion Model-based Image Editing by Posterior Collapse

Recent advancements in Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have revolutionized image synthesis and manipulation, raising significant concerns about data misappropriation and intellectual property infringement. While adversarial attacks have been extensively explored as a protective measure against such misuse of generative AI, current approaches are severely limited by their heavy reliance on model-specific knowledge and substantial computational costs. Drawing inspiration from the posterior collapse phenomenon observed in VAE training, we propose the Posterior Collapse Attack (PCA), a novel framework for protecting images from unauthorized manipulation. Through comprehensive theoretical analysis and empirical validation, we identify two distinct collapse phenomena during VAE inference: diffusion collapse and concentration collapse. Based on this discovery, we design a unified loss function that can flexibly achieve both types of collapse through parameter adjustment, each corresponding to different protection objectives in preventing image manipulation. Our method significantly reduces dependence on model-specific knowledge by requiring access to only the VAE encoder, which constitutes less than 4\% of LDM parameters. Notably, PCA achieves prompt-invariant protection by operating on the VAE encoder before text conditioning occurs, eliminating the need for empty prompt optimization required by existing methods. This minimal requirement enables PCA to maintain adequate transferability across various VAE-based LDM architectures while effectively preventing unauthorized image editing. Extensive experiments show PCA outperforms existing techniques in protection effectiveness, computational efficiency (runtime and VRAM), and generalization across VAE-based LDM variants. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhongliangGuo/PosteriorCollapseAttack.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 20, 2024

Fast, Expressive SE(n) Equivariant Networks through Weight-Sharing in Position-Orientation Space

Based on the theory of homogeneous spaces we derive geometrically optimal edge attributes to be used within the flexible message-passing framework. We formalize the notion of weight sharing in convolutional networks as the sharing of message functions over point-pairs that should be treated equally. We define equivalence classes of point-pairs that are identical up to a transformation in the group and derive attributes that uniquely identify these classes. Weight sharing is then obtained by conditioning message functions on these attributes. As an application of the theory, we develop an efficient equivariant group convolutional network for processing 3D point clouds. The theory of homogeneous spaces tells us how to do group convolutions with feature maps over the homogeneous space of positions R^3, position and orientations R^3 {times} S^2, and the group SE(3) itself. Among these, R^3 {times} S^2 is an optimal choice due to the ability to represent directional information, which R^3 methods cannot, and it significantly enhances computational efficiency compared to indexing features on the full SE(3) group. We support this claim with state-of-the-art results -- in accuracy and speed -- on five different benchmarks in 2D and 3D, including interatomic potential energy prediction, trajectory forecasting in N-body systems, and generating molecules via equivariant diffusion models.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 4, 2023

A New Federated Learning Framework Against Gradient Inversion Attacks

Federated Learning (FL) aims to protect data privacy by enabling clients to collectively train machine learning models without sharing their raw data. However, recent studies demonstrate that information exchanged during FL is subject to Gradient Inversion Attacks (GIA) and, consequently, a variety of privacy-preserving methods have been integrated into FL to thwart such attacks, such as Secure Multi-party Computing (SMC), Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Differential Privacy (DP). Despite their ability to protect data privacy, these approaches inherently involve substantial privacy-utility trade-offs. By revisiting the key to privacy exposure in FL under GIA, which lies in the frequent sharing of model gradients that contain private data, we take a new perspective by designing a novel privacy preserve FL framework that effectively ``breaks the direct connection'' between the shared parameters and the local private data to defend against GIA. Specifically, we propose a Hypernetwork Federated Learning (HyperFL) framework that utilizes hypernetworks to generate the parameters of the local model and only the hypernetwork parameters are uploaded to the server for aggregation. Theoretical analyses demonstrate the convergence rate of the proposed HyperFL, while extensive experimental results show the privacy-preserving capability and comparable performance of HyperFL. Code is available at https://github.com/Pengxin-Guo/HyperFL.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024 2

All You Need Is Hashing: Defending Against Data Reconstruction Attack in Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning is a trending solution for multi-party collaboration in training machine learning models. Industrial frameworks adopt secure multi-party computation methods such as homomorphic encryption to guarantee data security and privacy. However, a line of work has revealed that there are still leakage risks in VFL. The leakage is caused by the correlation between the intermediate representations and the raw data. Due to the powerful approximation ability of deep neural networks, an adversary can capture the correlation precisely and reconstruct the data. To deal with the threat of the data reconstruction attack, we propose a hashing-based VFL framework, called HashVFL, to cut off the reversibility directly. The one-way nature of hashing allows our framework to block all attempts to recover data from hash codes. However, integrating hashing also brings some challenges, e.g., the loss of information. This paper proposes and addresses three challenges to integrating hashing: learnability, bit balance, and consistency. Experimental results demonstrate HashVFL's efficiency in keeping the main task's performance and defending against data reconstruction attacks. Furthermore, we also analyze its potential value in detecting abnormal inputs. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments to prove HashVFL's generalization in various settings. In summary, HashVFL provides a new perspective on protecting multi-party's data security and privacy in VFL. We hope our study can attract more researchers to expand the application domains of HashVFL.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 1, 2022

FRAG: Toward Federated Vector Database Management for Collaborative and Secure Retrieval-Augmented Generation

This paper introduces Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (FRAG), a novel database management paradigm tailored for the growing needs of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, which are increasingly powered by large-language models (LLMs). FRAG enables mutually-distrusted parties to collaboratively perform Approximate k-Nearest Neighbor (ANN) searches on encrypted query vectors and encrypted data stored in distributed vector databases, all while ensuring that no party can gain any knowledge about the queries or data of others. Achieving this paradigm presents two key challenges: (i) ensuring strong security guarantees, such as Indistinguishability under Chosen-Plaintext Attack (IND-CPA), under practical assumptions (e.g., we avoid overly optimistic assumptions like non-collusion among parties); and (ii) maintaining performance overheads comparable to traditional, non-federated RAG systems. To address these challenges, FRAG employs a single-key homomorphic encryption protocol that simplifies key management across mutually-distrusted parties. Additionally, FRAG introduces a multiplicative caching technique to efficiently encrypt floating-point numbers, significantly improving computational performance in large-scale federated environments. We provide a rigorous security proof using standard cryptographic reductions and demonstrate the practical scalability and efficiency of FRAG through extensive experiments on both benchmark and real-world datasets.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

A Closer Look at GAN Priors: Exploiting Intermediate Features for Enhanced Model Inversion Attacks

Model Inversion (MI) attacks aim to reconstruct privacy-sensitive training data from released models by utilizing output information, raising extensive concerns about the security of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have contributed significantly to the improved performance of MI attacks due to their powerful ability to generate realistic images with high fidelity and appropriate semantics. However, previous MI attacks have solely disclosed private information in the latent space of GAN priors, limiting their semantic extraction and transferability across multiple target models and datasets. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method, Intermediate Features enhanced Generative Model Inversion (IF-GMI), which disassembles the GAN structure and exploits features between intermediate blocks. This allows us to extend the optimization space from latent code to intermediate features with enhanced expressive capabilities. To prevent GAN priors from generating unrealistic images, we apply a L1 ball constraint to the optimization process. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results under various settings, especially in the out-of-distribution (OOD) scenario. Our code is available at: https://github.com/final-solution/IF-GMI

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024

Unlearning Imperative: Securing Trustworthy and Responsible LLMs through Engineered Forgetting

The growing use of large language models in sensitive domains has exposed a critical weakness: the inability to ensure that private information can be permanently forgotten. Yet these systems still lack reliable mechanisms to guarantee that sensitive information can be permanently removed once it has been used. Retraining from the beginning is prohibitively costly, and existing unlearning methods remain fragmented, difficult to verify, and often vulnerable to recovery. This paper surveys recent research on machine unlearning for LLMs and considers how far current approaches can address these challenges. We review methods for evaluating whether forgetting has occurred, the resilience of unlearned models against adversarial attacks, and mechanisms that can support user trust when model complexity or proprietary limits restrict transparency. Technical solutions such as differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, federated learning, and ephemeral memory are examined alongside institutional safeguards including auditing practices and regulatory frameworks. The review finds steady progress, but robust and verifiable unlearning is still unresolved. Efficient techniques that avoid costly retraining, stronger defenses against adversarial recovery, and governance structures that reinforce accountability are needed if LLMs are to be deployed safely in sensitive applications. By integrating technical and organizational perspectives, this study outlines a pathway toward AI systems that can be required to forget, while maintaining both privacy and public trust.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 12, 2025

Dual-Layer Video Encryption using RSA Algorithm

This paper proposes a video encryption algorithm using RSA and Pseudo Noise (PN) sequence, aimed at applications requiring sensitive video information transfers. The system is primarily designed to work with files encoded using the Audio Video Interleaved (AVI) codec, although it can be easily ported for use with Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) encoded files. The audio and video components of the source separately undergo two layers of encryption to ensure a reasonable level of security. Encryption of the video component involves applying the RSA algorithm followed by the PN-based encryption. Similarly, the audio component is first encrypted using PN and further subjected to encryption using the Discrete Cosine Transform. Combining these techniques, an efficient system, invulnerable to security breaches and attacks with favorable values of parameters such as encryption/decryption speed, encryption/decryption ratio and visual degradation; has been put forth. For applications requiring encryption of sensitive data wherein stringent security requirements are of prime concern, the system is found to yield negligible similarities in visual perception between the original and the encrypted video sequence. For applications wherein visual similarity is not of major concern, we limit the encryption task to a single level of encryption which is accomplished by using RSA, thereby quickening the encryption process. Although some similarity between the original and encrypted video is observed in this case, it is not enough to comprehend the happenings in the video.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 14, 2015

Privacy-Preserving Federated Embedding Learning for Localized Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a promising solution for enhancing the accuracy and credibility of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in Question & Answer tasks. This is achieved by incorporating proprietary and private data from integrated databases. However, private RAG systems face significant challenges due to the scarcity of private ___domain data and critical data privacy issues. These obstacles impede the deployment of private RAG systems, as developing privacy-preserving RAG systems requires a delicate balance between data security and data availability. To address these challenges, we regard federated learning (FL) as a highly promising technology for privacy-preserving RAG services. We propose a novel framework called Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (FedE4RAG). This framework facilitates collaborative training of client-side RAG retrieval models. The parameters of these models are aggregated and distributed on a central-server, ensuring data privacy without direct sharing of raw data. In FedE4RAG, knowledge distillation is employed for communication between the server and client models. This technique improves the generalization of local RAG retrievers during the federated learning process. Additionally, we apply homomorphic encryption within federated learning to safeguard model parameters and mitigate concerns related to data leakage. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world dataset have validated the effectiveness of FedE4RAG. The results demonstrate that our proposed framework can markedly enhance the performance of private RAG systems while maintaining robust data privacy protection.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 27, 2025

QAE-BAC: Achieving Quantifiable Anonymity and Efficiency in Blockchain-Based Access Control with Attribute

Blockchain-based Attribute-Based Access Control (BC-ABAC) offers a decentralized paradigm for secure data governance but faces two inherent challenges: the transparency of blockchain ledgers threatens user privacy by enabling reidentification attacks through attribute analysis, while the computational complexity of policy matching clashes with blockchain's performance constraints. Existing solutions, such as those employing Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), often incur high overhead and lack measurable anonymity guarantees, while efficiency optimizations frequently ignore privacy implications. To address these dual challenges, this paper proposes QAEBAC (Quantifiable Anonymity and Efficiency in Blockchain-Based Access Control with Attribute). QAE-BAC introduces a formal (r, t)-anonymity model to dynamically quantify the re-identification risk of users based on their access attributes and history. Furthermore, it features an Entropy-Weighted Path Tree (EWPT) that optimizes policy structure based on realtime anonymity metrics, drastically reducing policy matching complexity. Implemented and evaluated on Hyperledger Fabric, QAE-BAC demonstrates a superior balance between privacy and performance. Experimental results show that it effectively mitigates re-identification risks and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to an 11x improvement in throughput and an 87% reduction in latency, proving its practicality for privacy-sensitive decentralized applications.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025

Reviving Shift Equivariance in Vision Transformers

Shift equivariance is a fundamental principle that governs how we perceive the world - our recognition of an object remains invariant with respect to shifts. Transformers have gained immense popularity due to their effectiveness in both language and vision tasks. While the self-attention operator in vision transformers (ViT) is permutation-equivariant and thus shift-equivariant, patch embedding, positional encoding, and subsampled attention in ViT variants can disrupt this property, resulting in inconsistent predictions even under small shift perturbations. Although there is a growing trend in incorporating the inductive bias of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into vision transformers, it does not fully address the issue. We propose an adaptive polyphase anchoring algorithm that can be seamlessly integrated into vision transformer models to ensure shift-equivariance in patch embedding and subsampled attention modules, such as window attention and global subsampled attention. Furthermore, we utilize depth-wise convolution to encode positional information. Our algorithms enable ViT, and its variants such as Twins to achieve 100% consistency with respect to input shift, demonstrate robustness to cropping, flipping, and affine transformations, and maintain consistent predictions even when the original models lose 20 percentage points on average when shifted by just a few pixels with Twins' accuracy dropping from 80.57% to 62.40%.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 12, 2023

Equivariant Graph Attention Networks with Structural Motifs for Predicting Cell Line-Specific Synergistic Drug Combinations

Cancer is the second leading cause of death, with chemotherapy as one of the primary forms of treatment. As a result, researchers are turning to drug combination therapy to decrease drug resistance and increase efficacy. Current methods of drug combination screening, such as in vivo and in vitro, are inefficient due to stark time and monetary costs. In silico methods have become increasingly important for screening drugs, but current methods are inaccurate and generalize poorly to unseen anticancer drugs. In this paper, I employ a geometric deep-learning model utilizing a graph attention network that is equivariant to 3D rotations, translations, and reflections with structural motifs. Additionally, the gene expression of cancer cell lines is utilized to classify synergistic drug combinations specific to each cell line. I compared the proposed geometric deep learning framework to current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, and the proposed model architecture achieved greater performance on all 12 benchmark tasks performed on the DrugComb dataset. Specifically, the proposed framework outperformed other SOTA methods by an accuracy difference greater than 28%. Based on these results, I believe that the equivariant graph attention network's capability of learning geometric data accounts for the large performance improvements. The model's ability to generalize to foreign drugs is thought to be due to the structural motifs providing a better representation of the molecule. Overall, I believe that the proposed equivariant geometric deep learning framework serves as an effective tool for virtually screening anticancer drug combinations for further validation in a wet lab environment. The code for this work is made available online at: https://github.com/WeToTheMoon/EGAT_DrugSynergy.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024

AEGIS: Adversarial Entropy-Guided Immune System -- Thermodynamic State Space Models for Zero-Day Network Evasion Detection

As TLS 1.3 encryption limits traditional Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), the security community has pivoted to Euclidean Transformer-based classifiers (e.g., ET-BERT) for encrypted traffic analysis. However, these models remain vulnerable to byte-level adversarial morphing -- recent pre-padding attacks reduced ET-BERT accuracy to 25.68%, while VLESS Reality bypasses certificate-based detection entirely. We introduce AEGIS: an Adversarial Entropy-Guided Immune System powered by a Thermodynamic Variance-Guided Hyperbolic Liquid State Space Model (TVD-HL-SSM). Rather than competing in the Euclidean payload-reading ___domain, AEGIS discards payload bytes in favor of 6-dimensional continuous-time flow physics projected into a non-Euclidean Poincare manifold. Liquid Time-Constants measure microsecond IAT decay, and a Thermodynamic Variance Detector computes sequence-wide Shannon Entropy to expose automated C2 tunnel anomalies. A pure C++ eBPF Harvester with zero-copy IPC bypasses the Python GIL, enabling a linear-time O(N) Mamba-3 core to process 64,000-packet swarms at line-rate. Evaluated on a 400GB, 4-tier adversarial corpus spanning backbone traffic, IoT botnets, zero-days, and proprietary VLESS Reality tunnels, AEGIS achieves an F1-score of 0.9952 and 99.50% True Positive Rate at 262 us inference latency on an RTX 4090, establishing a new state-of-the-art for physics-based adversarial network defense.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 1

CipherBank: Exploring the Boundary of LLM Reasoning Capabilities through Cryptography Challenges

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, especially the recent advancements in reasoning, such as o1 and o3, pushing the boundaries of AI. Despite these impressive achievements in mathematics and coding, the reasoning abilities of LLMs in domains requiring cryptographic expertise remain underexplored. In this paper, we introduce CipherBank, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in cryptographic decryption tasks. CipherBank comprises 2,358 meticulously crafted problems, covering 262 unique plaintexts across 5 domains and 14 subdomains, with a focus on privacy-sensitive and real-world scenarios that necessitate encryption. From a cryptographic perspective, CipherBank incorporates 3 major categories of encryption methods, spanning 9 distinct algorithms, ranging from classical ciphers to custom cryptographic techniques. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on CipherBank, e.g., GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and cutting-edge reasoning-focused models such as o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Our results reveal significant gaps in reasoning abilities not only between general-purpose chat LLMs and reasoning-focused LLMs but also in the performance of current reasoning-focused models when applied to classical cryptographic decryption tasks, highlighting the challenges these models face in understanding and manipulating encrypted data. Through detailed analysis and error investigations, we provide several key observations that shed light on the limitations and potential improvement areas for LLMs in cryptographic reasoning. These findings underscore the need for continuous advancements in LLM reasoning capabilities.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 26, 2025 4

Do Vision-Language Models Leak What They Learn? Adaptive Token-Weighted Model Inversion Attacks

Model inversion (MI) attacks pose significant privacy risks by reconstructing private training data from trained neural networks. While prior studies have primarily examined unimodal deep networks, the vulnerability of vision-language models (VLMs) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic study of MI attacks on VLMs to understand their susceptibility to leaking private visual training data. Our work makes two main contributions. First, tailored to the token-generative nature of VLMs, we introduce a suite of token-based and sequence-based model inversion strategies, providing a comprehensive analysis of VLMs' vulnerability under different attack formulations. Second, based on the observation that tokens vary in their visual grounding, and hence their gradients differ in informativeness for image reconstruction, we propose Sequence-based Model Inversion with Adaptive Token Weighting (SMI-AW) as a novel MI for VLMs. SMI-AW dynamically reweights each token's loss gradient according to its visual grounding, enabling the optimization to focus on visually informative tokens and more effectively guide the reconstruction of private images. Through extensive experiments and human evaluations on a range of state-of-the-art VLMs across multiple datasets, we show that VLMs are susceptible to training data leakage. Human evaluation of the reconstructed images yields an attack accuracy of 61.21%, underscoring the severity of these privacy risks. Notably, we demonstrate that publicly released VLMs are vulnerable to such attacks. Our study highlights the urgent need for privacy safeguards as VLMs become increasingly deployed in sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance. Our code and models are available at our project page: https://ngoc-nguyen-0.github.io/SMI_AW/

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

Expressive variational quantum circuits provide inherent privacy in federated learning

Federated learning has emerged as a viable distributed solution to train machine learning models without the actual need to share data with the central aggregator. However, standard neural network-based federated learning models have been shown to be susceptible to data leakage from the gradients shared with the server. In this work, we introduce federated learning with variational quantum circuit model built using expressive encoding maps coupled with overparameterized ans\"atze. We show that expressive maps lead to inherent privacy against gradient inversion attacks, while overparameterization ensures model trainability. Our privacy framework centers on the complexity of solving the system of high-degree multivariate Chebyshev polynomials generated by the gradients of quantum circuit. We present compelling arguments highlighting the inherent difficulty in solving these equations, both in exact and approximate scenarios. Additionally, we delve into machine learning-based attack strategies and establish a direct connection between overparameterization in the original federated learning model and underparameterization in the attack model. Furthermore, we provide numerical scaling arguments showcasing that underparameterization of the expressive map in the attack model leads to the loss landscape being swamped with exponentially many spurious local minima points, thus making it extremely hard to realize a successful attack. This provides a strong claim, for the first time, that the nature of quantum machine learning models inherently helps prevent data leakage in federated learning.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 22, 2023