Dissecting Distribution Inference
(Cross-post by Anshuman Suri) Distribution inference attacks aims to infer statistical properties of data used to train machine learning models. These attacks are sometimes surprisingly potent, as we demonstrated in previous work. KL Divergence Attack Most attacks against distribution inference involve training a meta-classifier, either using model parameters in white-box settings (Ganju et al., Property Inference Attacks on Fully Connected Neural Networks using Permutation Invariant Representations, CCS 2018), or using model predictions in black-box scenarios (Zhang et al.Cray Distinguished Speaker: On Leaky Models and Unintended Inferences
Here’s the slides from my Cray Distinguished Speaker talk on On Leaky Models and Unintended Inferences: [PDF] The chatGPT limerick version of my talk abstract is much better than mine: A machine learning model, oh so grand With data sets that it held in its hand It performed quite well But secrets to tell And an adversary’s tricks it could not withstand. Thanks to Stephen McCamant and Kangjie Lu for hosting my visit, and everyone at University of Minnesota.Attribute Inference attacks are really Imputation
Post by Bargav Jayaraman Attribute inference attacks have been shown by prior works to pose privacy threat against ML models. However, these works assume the knowledge of the training distribution and we show that in such cases these attacks do no better than a data imputataion attack that does not have access to the model. We explore the attribute inference risks in the cases where the adversary has limited or no prior knowledge of the training distribution and show that our white-box attribute inference attack (that uses neuron activations to infer the unknown sensitive attribute) surpasses imputation in these data constrained cases.Congratulations, Dr. Jayaraman!
Congratulations to Bargav Jayaraman for successfully defending his PhD thesis! Dr. Jayaraman and his PhD committee: Mohammad Mahmoody, Quanquan Gu (UCLA Department of Computer Science, on screen), Yanjun Qi (Committee Chair, on screen), Denis Nekipelov (Department of Economics, on screen), and David Evans Bargav will join the Meta AI Lab in Menlo Park, CA as a post-doctoral researcher. Analyzing the Leaky Cauldron: Inference Attacks on Machine Learning Machine learning models have been shown to leak sensitive information about their training data.BIML: What Machine Learnt Models Reveal
I gave a talk in the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning in the Barn series on What Machine Learnt Models Reveal, which is now available as an edited video: David Evans, a professor of computer science researching security and privacy at the University of Virginia, talks about data leakage risk in ML systems and different approaches used to attack and secure models and datasets. Juxtaposing adversarial risks that target records and those aimed at attributes, David shows that differential privacy cannot capture all inference risks, and calls for more research based on privacy experiments aimed at both datasets and distributions.Microsoft Research Summit: Surprising (and unsurprising) Inference Risks in Machine Learning
Here are the slides for my talk at the Practical and Theoretical Privacy of Machine Learning Training Pipelines Workshop at the Microsoft Research Summit (21 October 2021): Surprising (and Unsurprising) Inference Risks in Machine Learning [PDF] The work by Bargav Jayaraman (with Katherine Knipmeyer, Lingxiao Wang, and Quanquan Gu) that I talked about on improving membership inference attacks is described in more details here: Bargav Jayaraman, Lingxiao Wang, Katherine Knipmeyer, Quanquan Gu, David Evans.UVA News Article
UVA News has an article by Audra Book on our research on security and privacy of machine learning (with some very nice quotes from several students in the group, and me saying something positive about the NSA!): Computer science professor David Evans and his team conduct experiments to understand security and privacy risks associated with machine learning, 8 September 2021. David Evans, professor of computer science in the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, is leading research to understand how machine learning models can be compromised.ICLR DPML 2021: Inference Risks for Machine Learning
I gave an invited talk at the Distributed and Private Machine Learning (DPML) workshop at ICLR 2021 on Inference Risks for Machine Learning.
The talk mostly covers work by Bargav Jayaraman on evaluating privacy in machine learning and connecting attribute inference and imputation, and recent work by Anshuman Suri on property inference.