Keystroke biometrics is a promising approach for user identification and verification, leveraging the unique patterns in individuals' typing behavior. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based network that employs self-attention to extract informative features from keystroke sequences, surpassing the performance of traditional Recurrent Neural Networks. We explore two distinct architectures, namely bi-encoder and cross-encoder, and compare their effectiveness in keystroke authentication. Furthermore, we investigate different loss functions, including triplet, batch-all triplet, and WDCL loss, along with various distance metrics such as Euclidean, Manhattan, and cosine distances. These experiments allow us to optimize the training process and enhance the performance of our model. To evaluate our proposed model, we employ the Aalto desktop keystroke dataset. The results demonstrate that the bi-encoder architecture with batch-all triplet loss and cosine distance achieves the best performance, yielding an exceptional Equal Error Rate of 0.0186%. Furthermore, alternative algorithms for calculating similarity scores are explored to enhance accuracy. Notably, the utilization of a one-class Support Vector Machine reduces the Equal Error Rate to an impressive 0.0163%. The outcomes of this study indicate that our model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art in free-text keystroke authentication. These findings contribute to advancing the field of keystroke authentication and offer practical implications for secure user verification systems.
Keystroke dynamics is a behavioural biometric utilised for user identification and authentication. We propose a new set of features based on the distance between keys on the keyboard, a concept that has not been considered before in keystroke dynamics. We combine flight times, a popular metric, with the distance between keys on the keyboard and call them as Distance Enhanced Flight Time features (DEFT). This novel approach provides comprehensive insights into a person's typing behaviour, surpassing typing velocity alone. We build a DEFT model by combining DEFT features with other previously used keystroke dynamic features. The DEFT model is designed to be device-agnostic, allowing us to evaluate its effectiveness across three commonly used devices: desktop, mobile, and tablet. The DEFT model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods when we evaluate its effectiveness across two datasets. We obtain accuracy rates exceeding 99% and equal error rates below 10% on all three devices.
In previous research, keystroke dynamics has shown promise for user authentication, based on both fixed-text and free-text data. In this research, we consider the more challenging multiclass user identification problem, based on free-text data. We experiment with a complex image-like feature that has previously been used to achieve state-of-the-art authentication results over free-text data. Using this image-like feature and multiclass Convolutional Neural Networks, we are able to obtain a classification (i.e., identification) accuracy of 0.78 over a set of 148 users. However, we find that a Random Forest classifier trained on a slightly modified version of this same feature yields an accuracy of 0.93.
Various machine learning approaches have proven to be useful for user verification and identification based on motion data in eXtended Reality (XR). However, their real-world application still faces significant challenges concerning versatility, i.e., in terms of extensibility and generalization capability. This article presents a solution that is both extensible to new users without expensive retraining, and that generalizes well across different sessions, devices, and user tasks. To this end, we developed a similarity-learning model and pretrained it on the "Who Is Alyx?" dataset. This dataset features a wide array of tasks and hence motions from users playing the VR game "Half-Life: Alyx". In contrast to previous works, we used a dedicated set of users for model validation and final evaluation. Furthermore, we extended this evaluation using an independent dataset that features completely different users, tasks, and three different XR devices. In comparison with a traditional classification-learning baseline, our model shows superior performance, especially in scenarios with limited enrollment data. The pretraining process allows immediate deployment in a diverse range of XR applications while maintaining high versatility. Looking ahead, our approach paves the way for easy integration of pretrained motion-based identification models in production XR systems.
Over the course of the past two decades, a substantial body of research has substantiated the viability of utilising cardiac signals as a biometric modality. This paper presents a novel approach for patient identification in healthcare systems using electrocardiogram signals. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed to classify users based on electrocardiomatrices, a specific type of image derived from ECG signals. The proposed identification system is evaluated in multiple databases, achieving up to 99.84\% accuracy on healthy subjects, 97.09\% on patients with cardiovascular diseases, and 97.89% on mixed populations including both healthy and arrhythmic patients. The system also performs robustly under varying activity conditions, achieving 91.32% accuracy in scenarios involving different physical activities. These consistent and reliable results, with low error rates such as a FAR of 0.01% and FRR of 0.157% in the best cases, demonstrate the method's significant advancement in subject identification within healthcare systems. By considering patients' cardiovascular conditions and activity levels, the proposed approach addresses gaps in the existing literature, positioning it as a strong candidate for practical applications in real-world healthcare settings.
mmWave radar-based gait recognition is a novel user identification method that captures human gait biometrics from mmWave radar return signals. This technology offers privacy protection and is resilient to weather and lighting conditions. However, its generalization performance is yet unknown and limits its practical deployment. To address this problem, in this paper, a non-synthetic dataset is collected and analyzed to reveal the presence of spatial and temporal domain shifts in mmWave gait biometric data, which significantly impacts identification accuracy. To mitigate this issue, a novel self-aligned domain adaptation method called GaitSADA is proposed. GaitSADA improves system generalization performance by using a two-stage semi-supervised model training approach. The first stage employs semi-supervised contrastive learning to learn a compact gait representation from both source and target domain data, aligning source-target domain distributions implicitly. The second stage uses semi-supervised consistency training with centroid alignment to further close source-target domain gap by pseudo-labelling the target-domain samples, clustering together the samples belonging to the same class but from different domains, and pushing the class centroid close to the weight vector of each class. Experiments show that GaitSADA outperforms representative domain adaptation methods with an improvement ranging from 15.41\% to 26.32\% on average accuracy in low data regimes. Code and dataset will be available at https://exitudio.github.io/GaitSADA
This paper considers joint user identification and channel estimation (JUICE) in grant-free access with a \emph{clustered} user activity pattern. In particular, we address the JUICE in massive machine-type communications (mMTC) network under correlated Rayleigh fading channels with unknown channel covariance matrices. We formulate the JUICE problem as a maximum \emph{a posteriori} probability (MAP) problem with properly chosen priors to incorporate the partial knowledge of the UEs' clustered activity and the unknown covariance matrices. We derive a computationally-efficient algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the MAP problem iteratively via a sequence of closed-form updates. Numerical results highlight the significant improvements brought by the proposed approach in terms of channel estimation and activity detection performances for clustered user activity patterns.
In recent years, semi-supervised graph learning with data augmentation (DA) is currently the most commonly used and best-performing method to enhance model robustness in sparse scenarios with few labeled samples. Differing from homogeneous graph, DA in heterogeneous graph has greater challenges: heterogeneity of information requires DA strategies to effectively handle heterogeneous relations, which considers the information contribution of different types of neighbors and edges to the target nodes. Furthermore, over-squashing of information is caused by the negative curvature that formed by the non-uniformity distribution and strong clustering in complex graph. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel method named Semi-Supervised Heterogeneous Graph Learning with Multi-level Data Augmentation (HG-MDA). For the problem of heterogeneity of information in DA, node and topology augmentation strategies are proposed for the characteristics of heterogeneous graph. And meta-relation-based attention is applied as one of the indexes for selecting augmented nodes and edges. For the problem of over-squashing of information, triangle based edge adding and removing are designed to alleviate the negative curvature and bring the gain of topology. Finally, the loss function consists of the cross-entropy loss for labeled data and the consistency regularization for unlabeled data. In order to effectively fuse the prediction results of various DA strategies, the sharpening is used. Existing experiments on public datasets, i.e., ACM, DBLP, OGB, and industry dataset MB show that HG-MDA outperforms current SOTA models. Additionly, HG-MDA is applied to user identification in internet finance scenarios, helping the business to add 30% key users, and increase loans and balances by 3.6%, 11.1%, and 9.8%.
Vision-aided wireless communication is attracting increasing interest and finding new use cases in various wireless communication applications. These vision-aided communication frameworks leverage visual data captured, for example, by cameras installed at the infrastructure or mobile devices to construct some perception about the communication environment through the use of deep learning and advances in computer vision and visual scene understanding. Prior work has investigated various problems such as vision-aided beam, blockage, and hand-off prediction in millimeter wave (mmWave) systems and vision-aided covariance prediction in massive MIMO systems. This prior work, however, has focused on scenarios with a single object (user) in front of the camera. In this paper, we define the \textit{user identification} task as a key enabler for realistic vision-aided communication systems that can operate in crowded scenarios and support multi-user applications. The objective of the user identification task is to identify the target communication user from the other candidate objects (distractors) in the visual scene. We develop machine learning models that process either one frame or a sequence of frames of visual and wireless data to efficiently identify the target user in the visual/communication environment. Using the large-scale multi-modal sense and communication dataset, DeepSense 6G, which is based on real-world measurements, we show that the developed approaches can successfully identify the target users with more than 97$\%$ accuracy in realistic settings. This paves the way for scaling the vision-aided wireless communication applications to real-world scenarios and practical deployments.
Recommender systems are fundamental information filtering techniques to recommend content or items that meet users' personalities and potential needs. As a crucial solution to address the difficulty of user identification and unavailability of historical information, session-based recommender systems provide recommendation services that only rely on users' behaviors in the current session. However, most existing studies are not well-designed for modeling heterogeneous user behaviors and capturing the relationships between them in practical scenarios. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel graph-based method, namely Heterogeneous Information Crossing on Graphs (HICG). HICG utilizes multiple types of user behaviors in the sessions to construct heterogeneous graphs, and captures users' current interests with their long-term preferences by effectively crossing the heterogeneous information on the graphs. In addition, we also propose an enhanced version, named HICG-CL, which incorporates contrastive learning (CL) technique to enhance item representation ability. By utilizing the item co-occurrence relationships across different sessions, HICG-CL improves the recommendation performance of HICG. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world recommendation datasets, and the results verify that (i) HICG achieves the state-of-the-art performance by utilizing multiple types of behaviors on the heterogeneous graph. (ii) HICG-CL further significantly improves the recommendation performance of HICG by the proposed contrastive learning module.
In this paper, we propose a new technique to uniquely classify and identify multiple users accessing a single application using keystroke dynamics. This problem is usually encountered when multiple users have legitimate access to shared computers and accounts, where, at times, one user can inadvertently be logged in on another user's account. Since the login processes are usually bypassed at this stage, we rely on keystroke dynamics in order to tell users apart. Our algorithm uses the quantile transform and techniques from localization to classify and identify users. Specifically, we use an algorithm known as ordinal Unfolding based Localization (UNLOC), which uses only ordinal data obtained from comparing distance proxies, by "locating" users in a reduced PCA/Kernel-PCA/t-SNE space based on their typing patterns. Our results are validated with the help of benchmark keystroke datasets and show that our algorithm outperforms other methods.
Reliable and robust user identification and authentication are important and often necessary requirements for many digital services. It becomes paramount in social virtual reality (VR) to ensure trust, specifically in digital encounters with lifelike realistic-looking avatars as faithful replications of real persons. Recent research has shown that the movements of users in extended reality (XR) systems carry user-specific information and can thus be used to verify their identities. This article compares three different potential encodings of the motion data from head and hands (scene-relative, body-relative, and body-relative velocities), and the performances of five different machine learning architectures (random forest, multi-layer perceptron, fully recurrent neural network, long-short term memory, gated recurrent unit). We use the publicly available dataset "Talking with Hands" and publish all code to allow reproducibility and to provide baselines for future work. After hyperparameter optimization, the combination of a long-short term memory architecture and body-relative data outperformed competing combinations: the model correctly identifies any of the 34 subjects with an accuracy of 100% within 150 seconds. Altogether, our approach provides an effective foundation for behaviometric-based identification and authentication to guide researchers and practitioners. Data and code are published under https://go.uniwue.de/58w1r.
Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (SCSR) is an emerging yet challenging task that simultaneously considers the shared-account and cross-domain characteristics in the sequential recommendation. Existing works on SCSR are mainly based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Graph Neural Network (GNN) but they ignore the fact that although multiple users share a single account, it is mainly occupied by one user at a time. This observation motivates us to learn a more accurate user-specific account representation by attentively focusing on its recent behaviors. Furthermore, though existing works endow lower weights to irrelevant interactions, they may still dilute the domain information and impede the cross-domain recommendation. To address the above issues, we propose a reinforcement learning-based solution, namely RL-ISN, which consists of a basic cross-domain recommender and a reinforcement learning-based domain filter. Specifically, to model the account representation in the shared-account scenario, the basic recommender first clusters users' mixed behaviors as latent users, and then leverages an attention model over them to conduct user identification. To reduce the impact of irrelevant domain information, we formulate the domain filter as a hierarchical reinforcement learning task, where a high-level task is utilized to decide whether to revise the whole transferred sequence or not, and if it does, a low-level task is further performed to determine whether to remove each interaction within it or not. To evaluate the performance of our solution, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our RL-ISN method compared with the state-of-the-art recommendation methods.
This paper introduces a new quantum computing framework integrated with a two-step compressed sensing technique, applied to a joint channel estimation and user identification problem. We propose a variational quantum circuit (VQC) design as a new denoising solution. For a practical grant-free communications system having correlated device activities, variational quantum parameters for Pauli rotation gates in the proposed VQC system are optimized to facilitate to the non-linear estimation. Numerical results show that the VQC method can outperform modern compressed sensing techniques using an element-wise denoiser.
This paper addresses the problem of joint user identification and channel estimation (JUICE) for grant-free access in massive machine-type communications (mMTC). We consider the JUICE under a spatially correlated fading channel model as that reflects the main characteristics of the practical multiple-input multiple-output channels. We formulate the JUICE as a sparse recovery problem in a multiple measurement vector setup and present a solution based on the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm that takes into account the channel spatial correlation. Using the state evolution, we provide a detailed theoretical analysis on the activity detection performance of AMP-based JUICE by deriving closed-from expressions for the probabilities of miss detection and false alarm. The simulation experiments show that the performance predicted by the theoretical analysis matches the one obtained by the numerical results.
WiFi-based sensing has aroused immense attention over recent years. The rationale is that the signal fluctuations caused by humans carry the information of human behavior which can be extracted from the channel state information of WiFi. Still, the prior studies mainly focus on single-task sensing (STS), e.g., gesture recognition, indoor localization, user identification. Since the fluctuations caused by gestures are highly coupling with body features and the user's location, we propose a WiFi-based multi-task sensing model (Wimuse) to perform gesture recognition, indoor localization, and user identification tasks simultaneously. However, these tasks have different difficulty levels (i.e., imbalance issue) and need task-specific information (i.e., discrepancy issue). To address these issues, the knowledge distillation technique and task-specific residual adaptor are adopted in Wimuse. We first train the STS model for each task. Then, for solving the imbalance issue, the extracted common feature in Wimuse is encouraged to get close to the counterpart features of the STS models. Further, for each task, a task-specific residual adaptor is applied to extract the task-specific compensation feature which is fused with the common feature to address the discrepancy issue. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three public datasets and evaluation suggests that Wimuse achieves state-of-the-art performance with the average accuracy of 85.20%, 98.39%, and 98.725% on the joint task of gesture recognition, indoor localization, and user identification, respectively.
Several studies have reported that biometric identification based on eye movement characteristics can be used for authentication. This paper provides an extensive study of user identification via eye movements across multiple datasets based on an improved version of method originally proposed by George and Routray. We analyzed our method with respect to several factors that affect the identification accuracy, such as the type of stimulus, the IVT parameters (used for segmenting the trajectories into fixation and saccades), adding new features such as higher-order derivatives of eye movements, the inclusion of blink information, template aging, age and gender.We find that three methods namely selecting optimal IVT parameters, adding higher-order derivatives features and including an additional blink classifier have a positive impact on the identification accuracy. The improvements range from a few percentage points, up to an impressive 9 % increase on one of the datasets.
We propose the use of probabilistic programming techniques to tackle the malicious user identification problem in a recommendation algorithm. Probabilistic programming provides numerous advantages over other techniques, including but not limited to providing a disentangled representation of how malicious users acted under a structured model, as well as allowing for the quantification of damage caused by malicious users. We show experiments in malicious user identification using a model of regular and malicious users interacting with a simple recommendation algorithm, and provide a novel simulation-based measure for quantifying the effects of a user or group of users on its dynamics.
With the prevalence of online social networking sites (OSNs) and mobile devices, people are increasingly reliant on a variety of OSNs for keeping in touch with family and friends, and using it as a source of information. For example, a user might utilise multiple OSNs for different purposes, such as using Flickr to share holiday pictures with family and friends, and Twitter to post short messages about their thoughts. Identifying the same user across multiple OSNs is an important task as this allows us to understand the usage patterns of users among different OSNs, make recommendations when a user registers for a new OSN, and various other useful applications. To address this problem, we proposed an algorithm based on the multilayer perceptron using various types of features, namely: (i) user profile, such as name, location, description; (ii) temporal distribution of user generated content; and (iii) embedding based on user name, real name and description. Using a Twitter and Flickr dataset of users and their posting activities, we perform an empirical study on how these features affect the performance of user identification across the two OSNs and discuss our main findings based on the different features.
Grant-free access is considered as a key enabler to massive machine-type communications (mMTC) as it promotes energy-efficiency and small signalling overhead. Due to the sporadic user activity in mMTC, joint user identification and channel estimation (JUICE) is a main challenge. This paper addresses the JUICE in single-cell mMTC with single-antenna users and a multi-antenna base station (BS) under spatially correlated fading channels. In particular, by leveraging the sporadic user activity, we solve the JUICE in a multi measurement vector compressed sensing (CS) framework under two different cases, with and without the knowledge of prior channel distribution information (CDI) at the BS. First, for the case without prior information, we formulate the JUICE as an iterative reweighted $\ell_{2,1}$-norm minimization problem. Second, when the CDI is known to the BS, we exploit the available information and formulate the JUICE from a Bayesian estimation perspective as a maximum \emph{a posteriori} probability (MAP) estimation problem. For both JUICE formulations, we derive efficient iterative solutions based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The numerical experiments show that the proposed solutions achieve higher channel estimation quality and activity detection accuracy with shorter pilot sequences compared to existing algorithms.