FedCAda: Adaptive Client-Side Optimization for Accelerated and Stable Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent approach for collaborative training of machine learning models across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, the quest to balance acceleration and stability becomes a significant challenge in FL, especially on the client-side. In this paper, we introduce FedCAda, an innovative federated client adaptive algorithm designed to tackle this challenge. FedCAda leverages the Adam algorithm to adjust the correction process of the first moment estimate $m$ and the second moment estimate $v$ on the client-side and aggregate adaptive algorithm parameters on the server-side, aiming to accelerate convergence speed and communication efficiency while ensuring stability and performance. Additionally, we investigate several algorithms incorporating different adjustment functions. This comparative analysis revealed that due to the limited information contained within client models from other clients during the initial stages of federated learning, more substantial constraints need to be imposed on the parameters of the adaptive algorithm. As federated learning progresses and clients gather more global information, FedCAda gradually diminishes the impact on adaptive parameters. These findings provide insights for enhancing the robustness and efficiency of algorithmic improvements. Through extensive experiments on computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) datasets, we demonstrate that FedCAda outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of adaptability, convergence, stability, and overall performance. This work contributes to adaptive algorithms for federated learning, encouraging further exploration.

SilverSight: A Multi-Task Chinese Financial Large Language Model Based on Adaptive Semantic Space Learning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied across various specialized fields, leveraging their extensive knowledge to empower a multitude of scenarios within these domains. However, each field encompasses a variety of specific tasks that require learning, and the diverse, heterogeneous data across these domains can lead to conflicts during model task transfer. In response to this challenge, our study introduces an Adaptive Semantic Space Learning (ASSL) framework, which utilizes the adaptive reorganization of data distributions within the semantic space to enhance the performance and selection efficacy of multi-expert models. Utilizing this framework, we trained a financial multi-task LLM named "SilverSight". Our research findings demonstrate that our framework can achieve results close to those obtained with full data training using only 10% of the data, while also exhibiting strong generalization capabilities.

Fraud Detection with Binding Global and Local Relational Interaction

Graph Neural Network has been proved to be effective for fraud detection for its capability to encode node interaction and aggregate features in a holistic view. Recently, Transformer network with great sequence encoding ability, has also outperformed other GNN-based methods in literatures. However, both GNN-based and Transformer-based networks only encode one perspective of the whole graph, while GNN encodes global features and Transformer network encodes local ones. Furthermore, previous works ignored encoding global interaction features of the heterogeneous graph with separate networks, thus leading to suboptimal performance. In this work, we present a novel framework called Relation-Aware GNN with transFormer (RAGFormer) which simultaneously embeds local and global features into a target node. The simple yet effective network applies a modified GAGA module where each transformer layer is followed by a cross-relation aggregation layer, to encode local embeddings and node interactions across different relations. Apart from the Transformer-based network, we further introduce a Relation-Aware GNN module to learn global embeddings, which is later merged into the local embeddings by an attention fusion module and a skip connection. Extensive experiments on two popular public datasets and an industrial dataset demonstrate that RAGFormer achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Substantial analysis experiments validate the effectiveness of each submodule of RAGFormer and its high efficiency in utilizing small-scale data and low hyper-parameter sensitivity.

Are Large Language Models Rational Investors?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are progressively being adopted in financial analysis to harness their extensive knowledge base for interpreting complex market data and trends. However, their application in the financial domain is challenged by intrinsic biases (i.e., risk-preference bias) and a superficial grasp of market intricacies, underscoring the need for a thorough assessment of their financial insight. This study introduces a novel framework, Financial Bias Indicators (FBI), to critically evaluate the financial rationality of LLMs, focusing on their ability to discern and navigate the subtleties of financial information and to identify any irrational biases that might skew market analysis. Our research adopts an innovative methodology to measure financial rationality, integrating principles of behavioral finance to scrutinize the biases and decision-making patterns of LLMs. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 19 leading LLMs, considering factors such as model scale, training datasets, input strategies, etc. The findings reveal varying degrees of financial irrationality among the models, influenced by their design and training. Models trained specifically on financial datasets might exhibit greater irrationality, and it's possible that even larger financial language models (FinLLMs) could display more biases than smaller, more generalized models. This outcomes provide profound insights into how these elements affect the financial rationality of LLMs, indicating that targeted training and structured input methods could improve model performance. This work enriches our understanding of LLMs' strengths and weaknesses in financial applications, laying the groundwork for the development of more dependable and rational financial analysis tools.

$R^3$-NL2GQL: A Hybrid Models Approach for for Accuracy Enhancing and Hallucinations Mitigation

While current NL2SQL tasks constructed using Foundation Models have achieved commendable results, their direct application to Natural Language to Graph Query Language (NL2GQL) tasks poses challenges due to the significant differences between GQL and SQL expressions, as well as the numerous types of GQL. Our extensive experiments reveal that in NL2GQL tasks, larger Foundation Models demonstrate superior cross-schema generalization abilities, while smaller Foundation Models struggle to improve their GQL generation capabilities through fine-tuning. However, after fine-tuning, smaller models exhibit better intent comprehension and higher grammatical accuracy. Diverging from rule-based and slot-filling techniques, we introduce R3-NL2GQL, which employs both smaller and larger Foundation Models as reranker, rewriter and refiner. The approach harnesses the comprehension ability of smaller models for information reranker and rewriter, and the exceptional generalization and generation capabilities of larger models to transform input natural language queries and code structure schema into any form of GQLs. Recognizing the lack of established datasets in this nascent domain, we have created a bilingual dataset derived from graph database documentation and some open-source Knowledge Graphs (KGs). We tested our approach on this dataset and the experimental results showed that delivers promising performance and robustness.Our code and dataset is available at https://github.com/zhiqix/NL2GQL

Universal Adversarial Backdoor Attacks to Fool Vertical Federated Learning in Cloud-Edge Collaboration

Vertical federated learning (VFL) is a cloud-edge collaboration paradigm that enables edge nodes, comprising resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices, to cooperatively train artificial intelligence (AI) models while retaining their data locally. This paradigm facilitates improved privacy and security for edges and IoT devices, making VFL an essential component of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) systems. Nevertheless, the partitioned structure of VFL can be exploited by adversaries to inject a backdoor, enabling them to manipulate the VFL predictions. In this paper, we aim to investigate the vulnerability of VFL in the context of binary classification tasks. To this end, we define a threat model for backdoor attacks in VFL and introduce a universal adversarial backdoor (UAB) attack to poison the predictions of VFL. The UAB attack, consisting of universal trigger generation and clean-label backdoor injection, is incorporated during the VFL training at specific iterations. This is achieved by alternately optimizing the universal trigger and model parameters of VFL sub-problems. Our work distinguishes itself from existing studies on designing backdoor attacks for VFL, as those require the knowledge of auxiliary information not accessible within the split VFL architecture. In contrast, our approach does not necessitate any additional data to execute the attack. On the LendingClub and Zhongyuan datasets, our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 100\% backdoor task performance while maintaining the main task performance. Our results in this paper make a major advance to revealing the hidden backdoor risks of VFL, hence paving the way for the future development of secure AIoT.