Xun Chen


2024

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TrojFSP: Trojan Insertion in Few-shot Prompt Tuning
Mengxin Zheng | Jiaqi Xue | Xun Chen | Yanshan Wang | Qian Lou | Lei Jiang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Prompt tuning is one of the most effective solutions to adapting a fixed pre-trained language model (PLM) for various downstream tasks, especially with only a few input samples. However, the security issues, e.g., Trojan attacks, of prompt tuning on a few data samples are not well-studied. Transferring established data poisoning attacks directly to few-shot prompt tuning presents multiple challenges. One significant issue is the _poisoned imbalance issue_, where non-target class samples are added to the target class, resulting in a greater number of target-class samples compared to non-target class. While this issue is not critical in regular tuning, it significantly hampers the few-shot prompt tuning, making it difficult to simultaneously achieve a high attack success rate (ASR) and maintain clean data accuracy (CDA). Additionally, few-shot prompting is prone to overfitting in terms of both ASR and CDA. In this paper, we introduce _TrojFSP_, a method designed to address the challenges. To solve the poisoned imbalance issue, we develop a _Target-Class Shrink (TC-Shrink)_ technique, which aims to equalize the number of poisoning samples. To combat overfitting, we employ a _Selective Token Poisoning_ technique to boost attack performance. Furthermore, we introduce a _Trojan-Trigger Attention_ objective function to amplify the attention of the poisoned trojan prompt on triggers. Experiments show that our TrojFSP achieves an ASR of over 99% while maintaining negligible decreases in CDA across various PLMs and datasets. The source code of TrojFSP is available at _https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/TrojFSP_.

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Learning to Compress Prompt in Natural Language Formats
Yu-Neng Chuang | Tianwei Xing | Chia-Yuan Chang | Zirui Liu | Xun Chen | Xia Hu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large language models (LLMs) are great at processing multiple natural language processing tasks, but their abilities are constrained by inferior performance with long context, slow inference speed, and the high cost of computing the results. Deploying LLMs with precise and informative context helps users process large-scale datasets more effectively and cost-efficiently. Existing works rely on compressing long prompt contexts into soft prompts. However, soft prompt compression encounters limitations in transferability across different LLMs, especially API-based LLMs. To this end, this work aims to compress lengthy prompts in the form of natural language with LLM transferability. This poses two challenges: (i) Natural Language (NL) prompts are incompatible with back-propagation, and (ii) NL prompts lack flexibility in imposing length constraints. In this work, we propose a Natural Language Prompt Encapsulation (Nano-Capsulator) framework compressing original prompts into NL formatted Capsule Prompt while maintaining prompt utility and transferability. Specifically, to tackle the first challenge, the Nano-Capsulator is optimized by a reward function that interacts with the proposed semantics preserving loss. To address the second question, the Nano-Capsulator is optimized by a reward function featuring length constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that the Capsule Prompt can reduce 81.4% of the original length, decrease inference latency up to 4.5x, and save 80.1% of budget overheads while providing transferability across diverse LLMs and different datasets.

2022

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Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation
Kai Zhang | Yu Wang | Hongyi Wang | Lifu Huang | Carl Yang | Xun Chen | Lichao Sun
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Federated learning (FL) can be essential in knowledge representation, reasoning, and data mining applications over multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs). A recent study FedE first proposes an FL framework that shares entity embeddings of KGs across all clients. However, entity embedding sharing from FedE would incur a severe privacy leakage. Specifically, the known entity embedding can be used to infer whether a specific relation between two entities exists in a private client. In this paper, we introduce a novel attack method that aims to recover the original data based on the embedding information, which is further used to evaluate the vulnerabilities of FedE. Furthermore, we propose a Federated learning paradigm with privacy-preserving Relation embedding aggregation (FedR) to tackle the privacy issue in FedE. Besides, relation embedding sharing can significantly reduce the communication cost due to its smaller size of queries. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate FedR with five different KG embedding models and three datasets. Compared to FedE, FedR achieves similar utility and significant improvements regarding privacy-preserving effect and communication efficiency on the link prediction task.