Three Short Papers accepted at TheWebConf (WWW) 2025 from Professor Simon S. Woo’s Lab (DASH Lab)
2025-03-04
The Data-driven AI & Security HCI Lab (DASH Lab, Advisor: Simon S. Woo) has had three short papers accepted for publication at the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), a top-tier international conference in BK Computer Science, covering web technologies, internet advancements, data science, and artificial intelligence. The papers will be presented in April in Sydney, Australia. 1. Towards Safe Synthetic Image Generation On the Web: A Multimodal Robust NSFW Defense and Million Scale Dataset, WWW 2025 Authors:Muhammad Shahid Muneer (Ph.D. Student, Department of Software), Simon S. Woo (Professor, Department of Software, Sungkyunkwan University) 2. Fairness and Robustness in Machine Unlearning, WWW 2025 Authors: Khoa Tran (Integrated M.S./Ph.D. Student, Department of Software), Simon S. Woo (Professor, Department of Software, Sungkyunkwan University) Machine unlearning addresses the challenge of removing the influence of specific data from a pretrained model, which is a crucial issue in privacy protection. While existing approximated unlearning techniques emphasize accuracy and time efficiency, they fail to achieve exact unlearning. In this study, we are the first to incorporate fairness and robustness into machine unlearning research. Our study analyzes the relationship between fairness and robustness based on fairness conjectures, and experimental results confirm that a larger fairness gap makes the model more vulnerable. Additionally, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art approximated unlearning methods are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, significantly degrading model performance. Therefore, we argue that fairness-gap measurement and robustness metrics should be essential evaluation criteria for unlearning algorithms. Finally, our findings show that unlearning at the intermediate and final layers is sufficient while also improving time and memory efficiency. 3. SADRE: Saliency-Aware Diffusion Reconstruction for Effective Invisible Watermark Removal, WWW 2025 Authors: Inzamamul Alam (Ph.D. Student, Department of Software), Simon S. Woo (Professor, Department of Software, Sungkyunkwan University) To address the robustness limitations of existing watermarking techniques, this study proposes SADRE (Saliency-Aware Diffusion Reconstruction), a novel watermark removal framework. SADRE applies saliency mask-guided noise injection and diffusion-based reconstruction to preserve essential image features while effectively removing watermarks. Additionally, it adapts to varying watermark strengths through adaptive noise adjustment and ensures high-quality image restoration via a reverse diffusion process. Experimental results demonstrate that SADRE outperforms state-of-the-art watermarking techniques across key performance metrics, including PSNR, SSIM, Wasserstein Distance, and Bit Recovery Accuracy. This research establishes a theoretically robust and practically effective watermark removal solution, proving its reliability for real-world web content applications.
