Unified Locational Differential Privacy Framework

Aggregating statistics over geographical regions is important for many applications, such as analyzing income, election results, and disease spread. However, the sensitive nature of this data necessitates strong privacy protections to safeguard individuals. In this work, we present a unified locational differential privacy (DP) framework to enable private aggregation of various data types, including one-hot encoded, boolean, float, and integer arrays, over geographical regions. Our framework employs local DP mechanisms such as randomized response, the exponential mechanism, and the Gaussian mechanism. We evaluate our approach on four datasets representing significant location data aggregation scenarios. Results demonstrate the utility of our framework in providing formal DP guarantees while enabling geographical data analysis.

Are Chatbots Ready for Privacy-Sensitive Applications? An Investigation into Input Regurgitation and Prompt-Induced Sanitization

LLM-powered chatbots are becoming widely adopted in applications such as healthcare, personal assistants, industry hiring decisions, etc. In many of these cases, chatbots are fed sensitive, personal information in their prompts, as samples for in-context learning, retrieved records from a database, or as part of the conversation. The information provided in the prompt could directly appear in the output, which might have privacy ramifications if there is sensitive information there. As such, in this paper, we aim to understand the input copying and regurgitation capabilities of these models during inference and how they can be directly instructed to limit this copying by complying with regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR, based on their internal knowledge of them. More specifically, we find that when ChatGPT is prompted to summarize cover letters of a 100 candidates, it would retain personally identifiable information (PII) verbatim in 57.4% of cases, and we find this retention to be non-uniform between different subgroups of people, based on attributes such as gender identity. We then probe ChatGPT's perception of privacy-related policies and privatization mechanisms by directly instructing it to provide compliant outputs and observe a significant omission of PII from output.

#maskUp: Selective Attribute Encryption for Sensitive Vocalization for English language on Social Media Platforms

Social media has become a platform for people to stand up and raise their voices against social and criminal acts. Vocalization of such information has allowed the investigation and identification of criminals. However, revealing such sensitive information may jeopardize the victim's safety. We propose #maskUp, a safe method for information communication in a secure fashion to the relevant authorities, discouraging potential bullying of the victim. This would ensure security by conserving their privacy through natural language processing supplemented with selective encryption for sensitive attribute masking. To our knowledge, this is the first work that aims to protect the privacy of the victims by masking their private details as well as emboldening them to come forward to report crimes. The use of masking technology allows only binding authorities to view/un-mask this data. We construct and evaluate the proposed methodology on continual learning tasks, allowing practical implementation of the same in a real-world scenario. #maskUp successfully demonstrates this integration on sample datasets validating the presented objective.

AdaptKeyBERT: An Attention-Based approach towards Few-Shot & Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation of KeyBERT

Keyword extraction has been an important topic for modern natural language processing. With its applications ranging from ontology generation, fact verification in summarized text, and recommendation systems. While it has had significant data-intensive applications, it is often hampered when the data set is small. Downstream training for keyword extractors is a lengthy process and requires a significant amount of data. Recently, Few-shot Learning (FSL) and Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) have been proposed to tackle this problem. Therefore, we propose AdaptKeyBERT, a pipeline for training keyword extractors with LLM bases by incorporating the concept of regularized attention into a pre-training phase for downstream domain adaptation. As we believe our work has implications to be utilized in the pipeline of FSL/ZSL and keyword extraction, we open-source our code as well as provide the fine-tuning library of the same name AdaptKeyBERT at https://github.com/AmanPriyanshu/AdaptKeyBERT.

NERDA-Con: Extending NER models for Continual Learning -- Integrating Distinct Tasks and Updating Distribution Shifts

With increasing applications in areas such as biomedical information extraction pipelines and social media analytics, Named Entity Recognition (NER) has become an indispensable tool for knowledge extraction. However, with the gradual shift in language structure and vocabulary, NERs are plagued with distribution shifts, making them redundant or not as profitable without re-training. Re-training NERs based on Large Language Models (LLMs) from scratch over newly acquired data poses economic disadvantages. In contrast, re-training only with newly acquired data will result in Catastrophic Forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. Therefore, we propose NERDA-Con, a pipeline for training NERs with LLM bases by incorporating the concept of Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) into the NER fine-tuning NERDA pipeline. As we believe our work has implications to be utilized in the pipeline of continual learning and NER, we open-source our code as well as provide the fine-tuning library of the same name NERDA-Con at https://github.com/SupritiVijay/NERDA-Con and https://pypi.org/project/NERDA-Con/.

ARLIF-IDS -- Attention augmented Real-Time Isolation Forest Intrusion Detection System

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things and Software Defined Networking leverage lightweight strategies for the early detection of DDoS attacks. Previous literature demonstrates the utility of lower number of significant features for intrusion detection. Thus, it is essential to have a fast and effective security identification model based on low number of features. In this work, a novel Attention-based Isolation Forest Intrusion Detection System is proposed. The model considerably reduces training time and memory consumption of the generated model. For performance assessment, the model is assessed over two benchmark datasets, the NSL-KDD dataset & the KDDCUP'99 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed attention augmented model achieves a significant reduction in execution time, by 91.78%, and an average detection F1-Score of 0.93 on the NSL-KDD and KDDCUP'99 dataset. The results of performance evaluation show that the proposed methodology has low complexity and requires less processing time and computational resources, outperforming other current IDS based on machine learning algorithms.

Interpretability of Fine-grained Classification of Sadness and Depression

While sadness is a human emotion that people experience at certain times throughout their lives, inflicting them with emotional disappointment and pain, depression is a longer term mental illness which impairs social, occupational, and other vital regions of functioning making it a much more serious issue and needs to be catered to at the earliest. NLP techniques can be utilized for the detection and subsequent diagnosis of these emotions. Most of the open sourced data on the web deal with sadness as a part of depression, as an emotion even though the difference in severity of both is huge. Thus, we create our own novel dataset illustrating the difference between the two. In this paper, we aim to highlight the difference between the two and highlight how interpretable our models are to distinctly label sadness and depression. Due to the sensitive nature of such information, privacy measures need to be taken for handling and training of such data. Hence, we also explore the effect of Federated Learning (FL) on contextualised language models.

ExCode-Mixed: Explainable Approaches towards Sentiment Analysis on Code-Mixed Data using BERT models

The increasing use of social media sites in countries like India has given rise to large volumes of code-mixed data. Sentiment analysis of this data can provide integral insights into people's perspectives and opinions. Developing robust explainability techniques which explain why models make their predictions becomes essential. In this paper, we propose an adequate methodology to integrate explainable approaches into code-mixed sentiment analysis.

Efficient Hyperparameter Optimization for Differentially Private Deep Learning

Tuning the hyperparameters in the differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD) is a fundamental challenge. Unlike the typical SGD, private datasets cannot be used many times for hyperparameter search in DPSGD; e.g., via a grid search. Therefore, there is an essential need for algorithms that, within a given search space, can find near-optimal hyperparameters for the best achievable privacy-utility tradeoffs efficiently. We formulate this problem into a general optimization framework for establishing a desirable privacy-utility tradeoff, and systematically study three cost-effective algorithms for being used in the proposed framework: evolutionary, Bayesian, and reinforcement learning. Our experiments, for hyperparameter tuning in DPSGD conducted on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, show that these three algorithms significantly outperform the widely used grid search baseline. As this paper offers a first-of-a-kind framework for hyperparameter tuning in DPSGD, we discuss existing challenges and open directions for future studies. As we believe our work has implications to be utilized in the pipeline of private deep learning, we open-source our code at https://github.com/AmanPriyanshu/DP-HyperparamTuning.

When Differential Privacy Meets Interpretability: A Case Study

Given the increase in the use of personal data for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in tasks such as medical imaging and diagnosis, differentially private training of DNNs is surging in importance and there is a large body of work focusing on providing better privacy-utility trade-off. However, little attention is given to the interpretability of these models, and how the application of DP affects the quality of interpretations. We propose an extensive study into the effects of DP training on DNNs, especially on medical imaging applications, on the APTOS dataset.