The Fundamental Limits of Least-Privilege Learning

The promise of least-privilege learning -- to find feature representations that are useful for a learning task but prevent inference of any sensitive information unrelated to this task -- is highly appealing. However, so far this concept has only been stated informally. It thus remains an open question whether and how we can achieve this goal. In this work, we provide the first formalisation of the least-privilege principle for machine learning and characterise its feasibility. We prove that there is a fundamental trade-off between a representation's utility for a given task and its leakage beyond the intended task: it is not possible to learn representations that have high utility for the intended task but, at the same time prevent inference of any attribute other than the task label itself. This trade-off holds regardless of the technique used to learn the feature mappings that produce these representations. We empirically validate this result for a wide range of learning techniques, model architectures, and datasets.

Prediction without Preclusion: Recourse Verification with Reachable Sets

Machine learning models are often used to decide who will receive a loan, a job interview, or a public benefit. Standard techniques to build these models use features about people but overlook their actionability. In turn, models can assign predictions that are fixed, meaning that consumers who are denied loans, interviews, or benefits may be permanently locked out from access to credit, employment, or assistance. In this work, we introduce a formal testing procedure to flag models that assign fixed predictions that we call recourse verification. We develop machinery to reliably determine if a given model can provide recourse to its decision subjects from a set of user-specified actionability constraints. We demonstrate how our tools can ensure recourse and adversarial robustness in real-world datasets and use them to study the infeasibility of recourse in real-world lending datasets. Our results highlight how models can inadvertently assign fixed predictions that permanently bar access, and we provide tools to design algorithms that account for actionability when developing models.

Arbitrary Decisions are a Hidden Cost of Differentially-Private Training

Mechanisms used in privacy-preserving machine learning often aim to guarantee differential privacy (DP) during model training. Practical DP-ensuring training methods use randomization when fitting model parameters to privacy-sensitive data (e.g., adding Gaussian noise to clipped gradients). We demonstrate that such randomization incurs predictive multiplicity: for a given input example, the output predicted by equally-private models depends on the randomness used in training. Thus, for a given input, the predicted output can vary drastically if a model is re-trained, even if the same training dataset is used. The predictive-multiplicity cost of DP training has not been studied, and is currently neither audited for nor communicated to model designers and stakeholders. We derive a bound on the number of re-trainings required to estimate predictive multiplicity reliably. We analyze -- both theoretically and through extensive experiments -- the predictive-multiplicity cost of three DP-ensuring algorithms: output perturbation, objective perturbation, and DP-SGD. We demonstrate that the degree of predictive multiplicity rises as the level of privacy increases, and is unevenly distributed across individuals and demographic groups in the data. Because randomness used to ensure DP during training explains predictions for some examples, our results highlight a fundamental challenge to the justifiability of decisions supported by differentially-private models in high-stakes settings. We conclude that practitioners should audit the predictive multiplicity of their DP-ensuring algorithms before deploying them in applications of individual-level consequence.

Adversarial Robustness for Tabular Data through Cost and Utility Awareness

Many machine learning problems use data in the tabular domains. Adversarial examples can be especially damaging for these applications. Yet, existing works on adversarial robustness mainly focus on machine-learning models in the image and text domains. We argue that due to the differences between tabular data and images or text, existing threat models are inappropriate for tabular domains. These models do not capture that cost can be more important than imperceptibility, nor that the adversary could ascribe different value to the utility obtained from deploying different adversarial examples. We show that due to these differences the attack and defence methods used for images and text cannot be directly applied to the tabular setup. We address these issues by proposing new cost and utility-aware threat models tailored to the adversarial capabilities and constraints of attackers targeting tabular domains. We introduce a framework that enables us to design attack and defence mechanisms which result in models protected against cost or utility-aware adversaries, e.g., adversaries constrained by a certain dollar budget. We show that our approach is effective on three tabular datasets corresponding to applications for which adversarial examples can have economic and social implications.

What You See is What You Get: Distributional Generalization for Algorithm Design in Deep Learning

We investigate and leverage a connection between Differential Privacy (DP) and the recently proposed notion of Distributional Generalization (DG). Applying this connection, we introduce new conceptual tools for designing deep-learning methods that bypass "pathologies" of standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD). First, we prove that differentially private methods satisfy a "What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)" generalization guarantee: whatever a model does on its train data is almost exactly what it will do at test time. This guarantee is formally captured by distributional generalization. WYSIWYG enables principled algorithm design in deep learning by reducing $\textit{generalization}$ concerns to $\textit{optimization}$ ones: in order to mitigate unwanted behavior at test time, it is provably sufficient to mitigate this behavior on the train data. This is notably false for standard (non-DP) methods, hence this observation has applications even when privacy is not required. For example, importance sampling is known to fail for standard SGD, but we show that it has exactly the intended effect for DP-trained models. Thus, with DP-SGD, unlike with SGD, we can influence test-time behavior by making principled train-time interventions. We use these insights to construct simple algorithms which match or outperform SOTA in several distributional robustness applications, and to significantly improve the privacy vs. disparate impact trade-off of DP-SGD. Finally, we also improve on known theoretical bounds relating differential privacy, stability, and distributional generalization.

Adversarial for Good? How the Adversarial ML Community's Values Impede Socially Beneficial Uses of Attacks

Attacks from adversarial machine learning (ML) have the potential to be used "for good": they can be used to run counter to the existing power structures within ML, creating breathing space for those who would otherwise be the targets of surveillance and control. But most research on adversarial ML has not engaged in developing tools for resistance against ML systems. Why? In this paper, we review the broader impact statements that adversarial ML researchers wrote as part of their NeurIPS 2020 papers and assess the assumptions that authors have about the goals of their work. We also collect information about how authors view their work's impact more generally. We find that most adversarial ML researchers at NeurIPS hold two fundamental assumptions that will make it difficult for them to consider socially beneficial uses of attacks: (1) it is desirable to make systems robust, independent of context, and (2) attackers of systems are normatively bad and defenders of systems are normatively good. That is, despite their expressed and supposed neutrality, most adversarial ML researchers believe that the goal of their work is to secure systems, making it difficult to conceptualize and build tools for disrupting the status quo.

Exploring Data Pipelines through the Process Lens: a Reference Model forComputer Vision

Researchers have identified datasets used for training computer vision (CV) models as an important source of hazardous outcomes, and continue to examine popular CV datasets to expose their harms. These works tend to treat datasets as objects, or focus on particular steps in data production pipelines. We argue here that we could further systematize our analysis of harms by examining CV data pipelines through a process-oriented lens that captures the creation, the evolution and use of these datasets. As a step towards cultivating a process-oriented lens, we embarked on an empirical study of CV data pipelines informed by the field of method engineering. We present here a preliminary result: a reference model of CV data pipelines. Besides exploring the questions that this endeavor raises, we discuss how the process lens could support researchers in discovering understudied issues, and could help practitioners in making their processes more transparent.

Disparate Vulnerability: on the Unfairness of Privacy Attacks Against Machine Learning

A membership inference attack (MIA) against a machine learning model enables an attacker to determine whether a given data record was part of the model's training dataset or not. Such attacks have been shown to be practical both in centralized and federated settings, and pose a threat in many privacy-sensitive domains such as medicine or law enforcement. In the literature, the effectiveness of these attacks is invariably reported using metrics computed across the whole population. In this paper, we take a closer look at the attack's performance across different subgroups present in the data distributions. We introduce a framework that enables us to efficiently analyze the vulnerability of machine learning models to MIA. We discover that even if the accuracy of MIA looks no better than random guessing over the whole population, subgroups are subject to disparate vulnerability, i.e., certain subgroups can be significantly more vulnerable than others. We provide a theoretical definition for MIA vulnerability which we validate empirically both on synthetic and real data.

Questioning the assumptions behind fairness solutions

In addition to their benefits, optimization systems can have negative economic, moral, social, and political effects on populations as well as their environments. Frameworks like fairness have been proposed to aid service providers in addressing subsequent bias and discrimination during data collection and algorithm design. However, recent reports of neglect, unresponsiveness, and malevolence cast doubt on whether service providers can effectively implement fairness solutions. These reports invite us to revisit assumptions made about the service providers in fairness solutions. Namely, that service providers have (i) the incentives or (ii) the means to mitigate optimization externalities. Moreover, the environmental impact of these systems suggests that we need (iii) novel frameworks that consider systems other than algorithmic decision-making and recommender systems, and (iv) solutions that go beyond removing related algorithmic biases. Going forward, we propose Protective Optimization Technologies that enable optimization subjects to defend against negative consequences of optimization systems.

Evading classifiers in discrete domains with provable optimality guarantees

Security-critical applications such as malware, fraud, or spam detection, require machine learning models that operate on examples from constrained discrete domains. In these settings, gradient-based attacks that rely on adding perturbations often fail to produce adversarial examples that meet the domain constraints, and thus are not effective. We introduce a graphical framework that (1) formalizes existing attacks in discrete domains, (2) efficiently produces valid adversarial examples with guarantees of minimal cost, and (3) can accommodate complex cost functions beyond the commonly used p-norm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by crafting adversarial examples that evade a Twitter bot detection classifier using a provably minimal number of changes.