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Private Frequency Estimation Via Residue Number Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present \textsf{ModularSubsetSelection} (MSS), a new algorithm for locally differentially private (LDP) frequency estimation. Given a universe of size $k$ and $n$ users, our $\varepsilon$-LDP mechanism encodes each input via a Residue Number System (RNS) over $\ell$ pairwise-coprime moduli $m_0, \ldots, m_{\ell-1}$, and reports a randomly chosen index $j \in [\ell]$ along with the perturbed residue using the statistically optimal \textsf{SubsetSelection} (SS) (Wang et al. 2016). This design reduces the user communication cost from $Θ\bigl(ω\log_2(k/ω)\bigr)$ bits required by standard SS (with $ω\approx k/(e^\varepsilon+1)$) down to $\lceil \log_2 \ell \rceil + \lceil \log_2 m_j \rceil$ bits, where $m_j < k$. Server-side decoding runs in $Θ(n + r k \ell)$ time, where $r$ is the number of LSMR (Fong and Saunders 2011) iterations. In practice, with well-conditioned moduli (\textit{i.e.}, constant $r$ and $\ell = Θ(\log k)$), this becomes $Θ(n + k \log k)$. We prove that MSS achieves worst-case MSE within a constant factor of state-of-the-art protocols such as SS and \textsf{ProjectiveGeometryResponse} (PGR) (Feldman et al. 2022) while avoiding the algebraic prerequisites and dynamic-programming decoder required by PGR. Empirically, MSS matches the estimation accuracy of SS, PGR, and \textsf{RAPPOR} (Erlingsson, Pihur, and Korolova 2014) across realistic $(k, \varepsilon)$ settings, while offering faster decoding than PGR and shorter user messages than SS. Lastly, by sampling from multiple moduli and reporting only a single perturbed residue, MSS achieves the lowest reconstruction-attack success rate among all evaluated LDP protocols.


Safeguarding Graph Neural Networks against Topology Inference Attacks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful models for learning from graph-structured data. However, their widespread adoption has raised serious privacy concerns. While prior research has primarily focused on edge-level privacy, a critical yet underexplored threat lies in topology privacy - the confidentiality of the graph's overall structure. In this work, we present a comprehensive study on topology privacy risks in GNNs, revealing their vulnerability to graph-level inference attacks. To this end, we propose a suite of Topology Inference Attacks (TIAs) that can reconstruct the structure of a target training graph using only black-box access to a GNN model. Our findings show that GNNs are highly susceptible to these attacks, and that existing edge-level differential privacy mechanisms are insufficient as they either fail to mitigate the risk or severely compromise model accuracy. To address this challenge, we introduce Private Graph Reconstruction (PGR), a novel defense framework designed to protect topology privacy while maintaining model accuracy. PGR is formulated as a bi-level optimization problem, where a synthetic training graph is iteratively generated using meta-gradients, and the GNN model is concurrently updated based on the evolving graph. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PGR significantly reduces topology leakage with minimal impact on model accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/JeffffffFu/PGR.


Weak-to-Strong Generalization under Distribution Shifts

arXiv.org Machine Learning

As future superhuman models become increasingly complex, accurately supervising their behavior may exceed human capabilities. Recent works have demonstrated that in such scenarios, weak models can effectively supervise strong models, a phenomenon known as weak-to-strong generalization. However, we find that naive weak-to-strong generalization fails under distribution shifts, often leading to worse performance of the strong model than its weak supervisors. To address this, we propose RAVEN, a robust weak-to-strong generalization framework that dynamically learns the optimal combinations of weak models in addition to parameters of the strong model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RAVEN on image classification, text classification, and preference alignment tasks. RAVEN outperforms alternative baselines by over 30% on out-of-distribution tasks while matching or surpassing existing methods on in-distribution tasks. Moreover, our results show that RAVEN assigns higher weights to more accurate weak models, demonstrating its ability to automatically identify trustworthy supervision.


Performance-Guided Refinement for Visual Aerial Navigation using Editable Gaussian Splatting in FalconGym 2.0

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Next, we further improve the architecture of [3] by removing IMU inputs and instead feeding a short history of past controls to the controller (blue box in Figure 2), which provides implicit temporal context. Next, the controller training follows a similar imitation learning procedure as in [3]: we first implement a state-based expert that flies through different tracks in simulation; at each timestep, we render the onboard RGB image and record the state-based controller's expert action. The RGB image is passed through the trained U-Net to obtain a binary mask, and we form supervised pairs where the masked image coupled with the past control actions are used to predict the current action to train the controller. Thanks to the Edit API, now we can synthesize essentially arbitrarily many tracks in FalconGym 2.0 to train both perception and controller without additional per-track real-world effort required by [1], [3], [5]. To sample efficiently, our unique design choice is to train on two-gate tracks. Intuitively, the initial state together with two successive gates spans the local geometric variability of longer courses; a controller that performs well on such segments could generalize well to multi-gate tracks by invariance and composition, as is empirically confirmed in Section IV. C. Performance-Guided Refinement Training A straightforward method to collect training data for the visual policy would be to uniformly sample the two-gate track space that is dynamically feasible and observable (as defined at the start of this section). However, uniform sampling can be sample-inefficient in a large high-dimensional workspace. With our Edit API, we can steer training data col- lection toward the visual policy's weak spots and iteratively refine to improve the visual policy.


How to Mitigate Overfitting in Weak-to-strong Generalization?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Aligning powerful AI models on tasks that surpass human evaluation capabilities is the central problem of \textbf{superalignment}. To address this problem, weak-to-strong generalization aims to elicit the capabilities of strong models through weak supervisors and ensure that the behavior of strong models aligns with the intentions of weak supervisors without unsafe behaviors such as deception. Although weak-to-strong generalization exhibiting certain generalization capabilities, strong models exhibit significant overfitting in weak-to-strong generalization: Due to the strong fit ability of strong models, erroneous labels from weak supervisors may lead to overfitting in strong models. In addition, simply filtering out incorrect labels may lead to a degeneration in question quality, resulting in a weak generalization ability of strong models on hard questions. To mitigate overfitting in weak-to-strong generalization, we propose a two-stage framework that simultaneously improves the quality of supervision signals and the quality of input questions. Experimental results in three series of large language models and two mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our framework significantly improves PGR compared to naive weak-to-strong generalization, even achieving up to 100\% PGR on some models.


Prioritized Generative Replay

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Sample-efficient online reinforcement learning often uses replay buffers to store experience for reuse when updating the value function. However, uniform replay is inefficient, since certain classes of transitions can be more relevant to learning. While prioritization of more useful samples is helpful, this strategy can also lead to overfitting, as useful samples are likely to be more rare. In this work, we instead propose a prioritized, parametric version of an agent's memory, using generative models to capture online experience. This paradigm enables (1) densification of past experience, with new generations that benefit from the generative model's generalization capacity and (2) guidance via a family of "relevance functions" that push these generations towards more useful parts of an agent's acquired history. We show this recipe can be instantiated using conditional diffusion models and simple relevance functions such as curiosity- or value-based metrics. Our approach consistently improves performance and sample efficiency in both state- and pixel-based domains. We expose the mechanisms underlying these gains, showing how guidance promotes diversity in our generated transitions and reduces overfitting. We also showcase how our approach can train policies with even higher update-to-data ratios than before, opening up avenues to better scale online RL agents.


Can We Remove the Ground? Obstacle-aware Point Cloud Compression for Remote Object Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Efficient point cloud (PC) compression is crucial for streaming applications, such as augmented reality and cooperative perception. Classic PC compression techniques encode all the points in a frame. Tailoring compression towards perception tasks at the receiver side, we ask the question, "Can we remove the ground points during transmission without sacrificing the detection performance?" Our study reveals a strong dependency on the ground from state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D object detection models, especially on those points below and around the object. In this work, we propose a lightweight obstacle-aware Pillar-based Ground Removal (PGR) algorithm. PGR filters out ground points that do not provide context to object recognition, significantly improving compression ratio without sacrificing the receiver side perception performance. Not using heavy object detection or semantic segmentation models, PGR is light-weight, highly parallelizable, and effective. Our evaluations on KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset show that SOTA detection models work equally well with PGR removing 20-30% of the points, with a speeding of 86 FPS.


Höller

AAAI Conferences

Plan- and Goal Recognition (PGR) is the task of inferring the goals and plans of an agent based on its actions. A few years ago, an approach has been introduced that successfully exploits the performance of planning systems to solve it. That way, no specialized solvers are needed and PGR benefits from present and future research in planning. The approach uses classical planning systems and needs to plan (at least) once for every possible goal. However, models in PGR are often structured in a hierarchical way, similar to Hierarchical Task Networks (HTNs). These models are strictly more expressive than those in classical planning and can describe partially ordered sets of tasks or multiple goals with interleaving plans. We present the approach PGR as HTN Planning that enables the recognition of complex agent behavior by using unmodified, off-the-shelf HTN planners. Planning is thereby needed only once, regardless of how many possible goals there are. Our evaluation shows that current planning systems are able to handle large models with thousands of possible goals and that the approach results in high recognition rates.