IDT: Dual-Task Adversarial Attacks for Privacy Protection

Natural language processing (NLP) models may leak private information in different ways, including membership inference, reconstruction or attribute inference attacks. Sensitive information may not be explicit in the text, but hidden in underlying writing characteristics. Methods to protect privacy can involve using representations inside models that are demonstrated not to detect sensitive attributes or -- for instance, in cases where users might not trust a model, the sort of scenario of interest here -- changing the raw text before models can have access to it. The goal is to rewrite text to prevent someone from inferring a sensitive attribute (e.g. the gender of the author, or their location by the writing style) whilst keeping the text useful for its original intention (e.g. the sentiment of a product review). The few works tackling this have focused on generative techniques. However, these often create extensively different texts from the original ones or face problems such as mode collapse. This paper explores a novel adaptation of adversarial attack techniques to manipulate a text to deceive a classifier w.r.t one task (privacy) whilst keeping the predictions of another classifier trained for another task (utility) unchanged. We propose IDT, a method that analyses predictions made by auxiliary and interpretable models to identify which tokens are important to change for the privacy task, and which ones should be kept for the utility task. We evaluate different datasets for NLP suitable for different tasks. Automatic and human evaluations show that IDT retains the utility of text, while also outperforming existing methods when deceiving a classifier w.r.t privacy task.

Bayes' capacity as a measure for reconstruction attacks in federated learning

Within the machine learning community, reconstruction attacks are a principal attack of concern and have been identified even in federated learning, which was designed with privacy preservation in mind. In federated learning, it has been shown that an adversary with knowledge of the machine learning architecture is able to infer the exact value of a training element given an observation of the weight updates performed during stochastic gradient descent. In response to these threats, the privacy community recommends the use of differential privacy in the stochastic gradient descent algorithm, termed DP-SGD. However, DP has not yet been formally established as an effective countermeasure against reconstruction attacks. In this paper, we formalise the reconstruction threat model using the information-theoretic framework of quantitative information flow. We show that the Bayes' capacity, related to the Sibson mutual information of order infinity, represents a tight upper bound on the leakage of the DP-SGD algorithm to an adversary interested in performing a reconstruction attack. We provide empirical results demonstrating the effectiveness of this measure for comparing mechanisms against reconstruction threats.

Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Data Leakage from Partial Transformer Gradients

Recent studies have shown that distributed machine learning is vulnerable to gradient inversion attacks, where private training data can be reconstructed by analyzing the gradients of the models shared in training. Previous attacks established that such reconstructions are possible using gradients from all parameters in the entire models. However, we hypothesize that most of the involved modules, or even their sub-modules, are at risk of training data leakage, and we validate such vulnerabilities in various intermediate layers of language models. Our extensive experiments reveal that gradients from a single Transformer layer, or even a single linear component with 0.54% parameters, are susceptible to training data leakage. Additionally, we show that applying differential privacy on gradients during training offers limited protection against the novel vulnerability of data disclosure.

Here's a Free Lunch: Sanitizing Backdoored Models with Model Merge

The democratization of pre-trained language models through open-source initiatives has rapidly advanced innovation and expanded access to cutting-edge technologies. However, this openness also brings significant security risks, including backdoor attacks, where hidden malicious behaviors are triggered by specific inputs, compromising natural language processing (NLP) system integrity and reliability. This paper suggests that merging a backdoored model with other homogeneous models can remediate backdoor vulnerabilities even if such models are not entirely secure. In our experiments, we explore various models (BERT-Base, RoBERTa-Large, Llama2-7B, and Mistral-7B) and datasets (SST-2, OLID, AG News, and QNLI). Compared to multiple advanced defensive approaches, our method offers an effective and efficient inference-stage defense against backdoor attacks without additional resources or specific knowledge. Our approach consistently outperforms the other advanced baselines, leading to an average of 75% reduction in the attack success rate. Since model merging has been an established approach for improving model performance, the extra advantage it provides regarding defense can be seen as a cost-free bonus.

What Learned Representations and Influence Functions Can Tell Us About Adversarial Examples

Adversarial examples, deliberately crafted using small perturbations to fool deep neural networks, were first studied in image processing and more recently in NLP. While approaches to detecting adversarial examples in NLP have largely relied on search over input perturbations, image processing has seen a range of techniques that aim to characterise adversarial subspaces over the learned representations. In this paper, we adapt two such approaches to NLP, one based on nearest neighbors and influence functions and one on Mahalanobis distances. The former in particular produces a state-of-the-art detector when compared against several strong baselines; moreover, the novel use of influence functions provides insight into how the nature of adversarial example subspaces in NLP relate to those in image processing, and also how they differ depending on the kind of NLP task.

OptIForest: Optimal Isolation Forest for Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection plays an increasingly important role in various fields for critical tasks such as intrusion detection in cybersecurity, financial risk detection, and human health monitoring. A variety of anomaly detection methods have been proposed, and a category based on the isolation forest mechanism stands out due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and efficiency, e.g., iForest is often employed as a state-of-the-art detector for real deployment. While the majority of isolation forests use the binary structure, a framework LSHiForest has demonstrated that the multi-fork isolation tree structure can lead to better detection performance. However, there is no theoretical work answering the fundamentally and practically important question on the optimal tree structure for an isolation forest with respect to the branching factor. In this paper, we establish a theory on isolation efficiency to answer the question and determine the optimal branching factor for an isolation tree. Based on the theoretical underpinning, we design a practical optimal isolation forest OptIForest incorporating clustering based learning to hash which enables more information to be learned from data for better isolation quality. The rationale of our approach relies on a better bias-variance trade-off achieved by bias reduction in OptIForest. Extensive experiments on a series of benchmarking datasets for comparative and ablation studies demonstrate that our approach can efficiently and robustly achieve better detection performance in general than the state-of-the-arts including the deep learning based methods.

Directional Privacy for Deep Learning

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) is a key method for applying privacy in the training of deep learning models. This applies isotropic Gaussian noise to gradients during training, which can perturb these gradients in any direction, damaging utility. Metric DP, however, can provide alternative mechanisms based on arbitrary metrics that might be more suitable. In this paper we apply \textit{directional privacy}, via a mechanism based on the von Mises-Fisher (VMF) distribution, to perturb gradients in terms of \textit{angular distance} so that gradient direction is broadly preserved. We show that this provides $\epsilon d$-privacy for deep learning training, rather than the $(\epsilon, \delta)$-privacy of the Gaussian mechanism; and that experimentally, on key datasets, the VMF mechanism can outperform the Gaussian in the utility-privacy trade-off.

Detecting Textual Adversarial Examples Based on Distributional Characteristics of Data Representations

Although deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various machine learning tasks, adversarial examples, constructed by adding small non-random perturbations to correctly classified inputs, successfully fool highly expressive deep classifiers into incorrect predictions. Approaches to adversarial attacks in natural language tasks have boomed in the last five years using character-level, word-level, phrase-level, or sentence-level textual perturbations. While there is some work in NLP on defending against such attacks through proactive methods, like adversarial training, there is to our knowledge no effective general reactive approaches to defence via detection of textual adversarial examples such as is found in the image processing literature. In this paper, we propose two new reactive methods for NLP to fill this gap, which unlike the few limited application baselines from NLP are based entirely on distribution characteristics of learned representations: we adapt one from the image processing literature (Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID)), and propose a novel one (MultiDistance Representation Ensemble Method (MDRE)). Adapted LID and MDRE obtain state-of-the-art results on character-level, word-level, and phrase-level attacks on the IMDB dataset as well as on the later two with respect to the MultiNLI dataset. For future research, we publish our code.

Deep Reinforcement Learning Guided Graph Neural Networks for Brain Network Analysis

Modern neuroimaging techniques, such as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), enable us to model the human brain as a brain network or connectome. Capturing brain networks' structural information and hierarchical patterns is essential for understanding brain functions and disease states. Recently, the promising network representation learning capability of graph neural networks (GNNs) has prompted many GNN-based methods for brain network analysis to be proposed. Specifically, these methods apply feature aggregation and global pooling to convert brain network instances into meaningful low-dimensional representations used for downstream brain network analysis tasks. However, existing GNN-based methods often neglect that brain networks of different subjects may require various aggregation iterations and use GNN with a fixed number of layers to learn all brain networks. Therefore, how to fully release the potential of GNNs to promote brain network analysis is still non-trivial. To solve this problem, we propose a novel brain network representation framework, namely BN-GNN, which searches for the optimal GNN architecture for each brain network. Concretely, BN-GNN employs deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to train a meta-policy to automatically determine the optimal number of feature aggregations (reflected in the number of GNN layers) required for a given brain network. Extensive experiments on eight real-world brain network datasets demonstrate that our proposed BN-GNN improves the performance of traditional GNNs on different brain network analysis tasks.

Neural Rule-Execution Tracking Machine For Transformer-Based Text Generation

Sequence-to-Sequence (S2S) neural text generation models, especially the pre-trained ones (e.g., BART and T5), have exhibited compelling performance on various natural language generation tasks. However, the black-box nature of these models limits their application in tasks where specific rules (e.g., controllable constraints, prior knowledge) need to be executed. Previous works either design specific model structure (e.g., Copy Mechanism corresponding to the rule "the generated output should include certain words in the source input") or implement specialized inference algorithm (e.g., Constrained Beam Search) to execute particular rules through the text generation. These methods require careful design case-by-case and are difficult to support multiple rules concurrently. In this paper, we propose a novel module named Neural Rule-Execution Tracking Machine that can be equipped into various transformer-based generators to leverage multiple rules simultaneously to guide the neural generation model for superior generation performance in a unified and scalable way. Extensive experimental results on several benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed model in both controllable and general text generation.