Quantifying the Privacy of Counterfactuals by Leveraging Membership Inference Attacks Against Synthetic Data

Counterfactuals are typically used in high-stakes decision areas to explain a machine learning model by showing how changes to the user profiles result in the desired outcome. However, explaining the model's decisions through counterfactuals can also be exploited by an adversary to conduct privacy attacks against the model or its training data. Drawing on the analogy that counterfactuals provide realistic substitutes for real training data, similar to synthetic data, we demonstrate in this paper how it is possible to successfully perform privacy attacks on counterfactuals by drawing on the attacks developed against synthetic data. More precisely, we investigate the effectiveness of the membership inference attacks designed for synthetic data on various types of counterfactuals. Additionally, while existing membership inference attacks against counterfactuals usually require to be able to query the model, we show how it is possible to perform successful membership inference attacks using only a set of counterfactuals, with no access to the model from which they are generated. Our results demonstrate that model developers should be more cautious when releasing counterfactuals to various users, as it can lead to a privacy breach.

Using Singular Value Decomposition in a Convolutional Neural Network to Improve Brain Tumor Segmentation Accuracy

A brain tumor consists of cells showing abnormal brain growth. The area of the brain tumor significantly affects choosing the type of treatment and following the course of the disease during the treatment. At the same time, pictures of Brain MRIs are accompanied by noise. Eliminating existing noises can significantly impact the better segmentation and diagnosis of brain tumors. In this work, we have tried using the analysis of eigenvalues. We have used the MSVD algorithm, reducing the image noise and then using the deep neural network to segment the tumor in the images. The proposed method's accuracy was increased by 2.4% compared to using the original images. With Using the MSVD method, convergence speed has also increased, showing the proposed method's effectiveness

Survey on AI Ethics: A Socio-technical Perspective

The past decade has observed a great advancement in AI with deep learning-based models being deployed in diverse scenarios including safety-critical applications. As these AI systems become deeply embedded in our societal infrastructure, the repercussions of their decisions and actions have significant consequences, making the ethical implications of AI deployment highly relevant and important. The ethical concerns associated with AI are multifaceted, including challenging issues of fairness, privacy and data protection, responsibility and accountability, safety and robustness, transparency and explainability, and environmental impact. These principles together form the foundations of ethical AI considerations that concern every stakeholder in the AI system lifecycle. In light of the present ethical and future x-risk concerns, governments have shown increasing interest in establishing guidelines for the ethical deployment of AI. This work unifies the current and future ethical concerns of deploying AI into society. While we acknowledge and appreciate the technical surveys for each of the ethical principles concerned, in this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview that not only addresses each principle from a technical point of view but also discusses them from a social perspective.