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Robert Birke

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3 papers

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Collaborative and Confidential Junction Trees for Hybrid Bayesian Networks

Roberto Gheda
Abele Mălan
Thiago Guzella
Carlo Lancia
Robert Birke
Lydia Chen

Bayesian Network models are a powerful tool to collaboratively optimize production processes in various manufacturing industries. When interacting, collaborating parties must preserve their business secrets by maintaining the confidentiality of their model structures and parameters. While most realistic industry scenarios involve hybrid settings, handling both discrete and continuous data, current state-of-the-art methods for collaborative and confidential inference only support discrete data and have high communication costs. In a centralized setting, Junction Trees enable efficient inference even in hybrid scenarios without discretizing continuous variables, but no extension for collaborative and confidential scenarios exists. To address this research gap, we introduce Hybrid CCJT, the first framework for confidential multiparty inference in hybrid domains with semi-honest, non-colluding adversaries, comprising: (i) a method to construct a strongly-rooted Junction Tree across collaborating parties through a novel construct of interface cliques; and, (ii) a protocol for confidential inference built upon multiparty computation primitives comprising a one-time alignment phase and a belief propagation system for combining the inference results across the Junction Tree cliques. Extensive evaluation on nine datasets shows that Hybrid CCJT improves the predictive accuracy of continuous target variables by 32% on average compared to the state-of-the-art, while reducing communication costs by a median 10. 4x under purely discrete scenarios.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

TabWak: A Watermark for Tabular Diffusion Models

Chaoyi Zhu
Jiayi Tang
Jeroen M. Galjaard
Pin-Yu Chen
Robert Birke
Cornelis Bos
Lydia Y. Chen

Synthetic data offers alternatives for data augmentation and sharing. Till date, it remains unknown how to use watermarking techniques to trace and audit synthetic tables generated by tabular diffusion models to mitigate potential misuses. In this paper, we design TabWak, the first watermarking method to embed invisible signatures that control the sampling of Gaussian latent codes used to synthesize table rows via the diffusion backbone. TabWak has two key features. Different from existing image watermarking techniques, TabWak uses self-cloning and shuffling to embed the secret key in positional information of random seeds that control the Gaussian latents, allowing to use different seeds at each row for high inter-row diversity and enabling row-wise detectability. To further boost the robustness of watermark detection against post-editing attacks, TabWak uses a valid-bit mechanism that focuses on the tail of the latent code distribution for superior noise resilience. We provide theoretical guarantees on the row diversity and effectiveness of detectability. We evaluate TabWak on five datasets against baselines to show that the quality of watermarked tables remains nearly indistinguishable from non-watermarked tables while achieving high detectability in the presence of strong post-editing attacks, with a 100% true positive rate at a 0.1% false positive rate on synthetic tables with fewer than 300 rows. Our code is available at the following anonymized repository https://github.com/chaoyitud/TabWak.

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TAAS Journal 2018 Journal Article

Effective Capacity Modulation as an Explicit Control Knob for Public Cloud Profitability

Cheng Wang
Bhuvan Urgaonkar
George Kesidis
Aayush Gupta
Lydia Y. Chen
Robert Birke

In this article, we explore the efficacy of dynamic effective capacity modulation (i.e., using virtualization techniques to offer lower resource capacity than that advertised by the cloud provider) as a control knob for a cloud provider’s profit maximization complementing the more well-studied approach of dynamic pricing. In particular, our focus is on emerging cloud ecosystems wherein we expect tenants to modify their demands strategically in response to such modulation in effective capacity and prices. Toward this, we consider a simple model of a cloud provider that offers a single type of virtual machine to its tenants and devise a leader/follower game-based cloud control framework to capture the interactions between the provider and its tenants. We assume both parties employ myopic control and short-term predictions to reflect their operation under the high dynamism and poor predictability in such environments. Our evaluation using a combination of real data center traces and real-world benchmarks hosted on a prototype OpenStack-based cloud shows 10% to 30% profit improvement for a cloud provider compared with baselines that use static pricing and/or static effective capacity.

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