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Yujin Han

Publications and source records attributed to Yujin Han.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Improving Group Robustness on Spurious Correlation Requires Preciser Group Inference

Standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) models may prioritize learning spurious correlations between spurious features and true labels, leading to poor accuracy on groups where these correlations do not hold. Mitigating this issue often requires expensive spurious attribute (group) labels or relies on trained ERM models to infer group labels when group information is unavailable. However, the significant performance gap in worst-group accuracy between using pseudo group labels and using oracle group labels inspires us to consider further improving group robustness through preciser group inference. Therefore, we propose GIC, a novel method that accurately infers group labels, resulting in improved worst-group performance. GIC trains a spurious attribute classifier based on two key properties of spurious correlations: (1) high correlation between spurious attributes and true labels, and (2) variability in this correlation between datasets with different group distributions. Empirical studies on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GIC in inferring group labels, and combining GIC with various downstream invariant learning methods improves worst-group accuracy, showcasing its powerful flexibility. Additionally, through analyzing the misclassifications in GIC, we identify an interesting phenomenon called semantic consistency, which may contribute to better decoupling the association between spurious attributes and labels, thereby mitigating spurious correlation. The code for GIC is available at https://github.com/yujinhanml/GIC.

cs.LG↗

Conformalized Semi-supervised Random Forest for Classification and Abnormality Detection

The Random Forests classifier, a widely utilized off-the-shelf classification tool, assumes training and test samples come from the same distribution as other standard classifiers. However, in safety-critical scenarios like medical diagnosis and network attack detection, discrepancies between the training and test sets, including the potential presence of novel outlier samples not appearing during training, can pose significant challenges. To address this problem, we introduce the Conformalized Semi-Supervised Random Forest (CSForest), which couples the conformalization technique Jackknife+aB with semi-supervised tree ensembles to construct a set-valued prediction $C(x)$. Instead of optimizing over the training distribution, CSForest employs unlabeled test samples to enhance accuracy and flag unseen outliers by generating an empty set. Theoretically, we establish CSForest to cover true labels for previously observed inlier classes under arbitrarily label-shift in the test data. We compare CSForest with state-of-the-art methods using synthetic examples and various real-world datasets, under different types of distribution changes in the test domain. Our results highlight CSForest's effective prediction of inliers and its ability to detect outlier samples unique to the test data. In addition, CSForest shows persistently good performance as the sizes of the training and test sets vary. Codes of CSForest are available at https://github.com/yujinhan98/CSForest.

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GAN-based Vertical Federated Learning for Label Protection in Binary Classification

Split learning (splitNN) has emerged as a popular strategy for addressing the high computational costs and low modeling efficiency in Vertical Federated Learning (VFL). However, despite its popularity, vanilla splitNN lacks encryption protection, leaving it vulnerable to privacy leakage issues, especially Label Leakage from Gradients (LLG). Motivated by the LLG issue resulting from the use of labels during training, we propose the Generative Adversarial Federated Model (GAFM), a novel method designed specifically to enhance label privacy protection by integrating splitNN with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). GAFM leverages GANs to indirectly utilize label information by learning the label distribution rather than relying on explicit labels, thereby mitigating LLG. GAFM also employs an additional cross-entropy loss based on the noisy labels to further improve the prediction accuracy. Our ablation experiment demonstrates that the combination of GAN and the cross-entropy loss component is necessary to enable GAFM to mitigate LLG without significantly compromising the model utility. Empirical results on various datasets show that GAFM achieves a better and more robust trade-off between model utility and privacy compared to all baselines across multiple random runs. In addition, we provide experimental justification to substantiate GAFM's superiority over splitNN, demonstrating that it offers enhanced label protection through gradient perturbation relative to splitNN.

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FedGBF: An efficient vertical federated learning framework via gradient boosting and bagging

Federated learning, conducive to solving data privacy and security problems, has attracted increasing attention recently. However, the existing federated boosting model sequentially builds a decision tree model with the weak base learner, resulting in redundant boosting steps and high interactive communication costs. In contrast, the federated bagging model saves time by building multi-decision trees in parallel, but it suffers from performance loss. With the aim of obtaining an outstanding performance with less time cost, we propose a novel model in a vertically federated setting termed as Federated Gradient Boosting Forest (FedGBF). FedGBF simultaneously integrates the boosting and bagging's preponderance by building the decision trees in parallel as a base learner for boosting. Subsequent to FedGBF, the problem of hyperparameters tuning is rising. Then we propose the Dynamic FedGBF, which dynamically changes each forest's parameters and thus reduces the complexity. Finally, the experiments based on the benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

cs.LG↗