Outsourcing deep neural networks (DNNs) inference tasks to an untrusted cloud raises data privacy and integrity concerns. While there are many techniques to ensure privacy and integrity for polynomial-based computations, DNNs involve non-polynomial computations. To address these challenges, several privacy-preserving and verifiable inference techniques have been proposed based on replacing the non-polynomial activation functions such as the rectified linear unit (ReLU) function with polynomial activation functions. Such techniques usually require polynomials with integer coefficients or polynomials over finite fields. Motivated by such requirements, several works proposed replacing the ReLU function with the square function. In this work, we empirically show that the square function is not the best degree-2 polynomial that can replace the ReLU function even when restricting the polynomials to have integer coefficients. We instead propose a degree-2 polynomial activation function with a first order term and empirically show that it can lead to much better models. Our experiments on the CIFAR and Tiny ImageNet datasets on various architectures such as VGG-16 show that our proposed function improves the test accuracy by up to 10.4% compared to the square function.
ZTFed-MAS2S: A Zero-Trust Federated Learning Framework with Verifiable Privacy and Trust-Aware Aggregation for Wind Power Data Imputation
School of Electrical Engineering, Northeast Electric Power University（电气工程学院，东北电力大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（人工智能与自动化学院，华中科技大学）；State Grid Xiamen Electric Power Supply Company（国家电网厦门供电有限公司）；Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong（电气工程系，香港城市大学）
Privacy-Preserving and Verifiable Approximate Distributed Coded Computing
Galician Research and Development Center in Advanced Telecommunications (GRADIANT)（加利西亚先进电信研究与发展中心（GRADIANT））；atlanTTic, Information & Computing Lab (ICLAB), Telecommunication Engineering School, Universidade de Vigo（atlanTTic，信息与计算实验室（ICLAB），电信工程学校，维戈大学）
ZKP-FedEval: Verifiable and Privacy-Preserving Federated Evaluation using Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Department of Multidisciplinary Engineering, Texas A&M University（多学科工程系，德克萨斯A&M大学）；Department of Computer Science, Ho Technical University（计算机科学系，霍技术大学）；Department of Computer Engineering, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST)（计算机工程系，库马西科学与技术大学（KNUST））
AutoReP: Automatic ReLU Replacement for Fast Private Network Inference
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Walmart Global Tech（沃尔玛全球科技）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
PrivEraserVerify: Efficient, Private, and Verifiable Federated Unlearning
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering（电子与通信工程系）；Department of Mathematics and Computer Science（数学与计算机科学系）；Khulna University of Engineering & Technology（库尔纳工程与技术大学）；Hobart and William Smith Colleges（霍巴特和威廉·斯密斯学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering（电气与电子工程系）
A Survey of Zero-Knowledge Proof Based Verifiable Machine Learning
College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学电子与信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Cyber Engineering, Guangzhou University（广州大学计算机科学与网络工程学院）；School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学电子与信息学院）；State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学网络与交换技术国家重点实验室）；School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学电子工程与光电技术学院）
Survey of Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Filtering
Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）；University of Missouri-Columbia（密苏里大学哥伦比亚分校）；Applied Computational Intelligence Laboratory, Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学应用计算智能实验室）
