On the Faithfulness of Vision Transformer Explanations

To interpret Vision Transformers, post-hoc explanations assign salience scores to input pixels, providing human-understandable heatmaps. However, whether these interpretations reflect true rationales behind the model's output is still underexplored. To address this gap, we study the faithfulness criterion of explanations: the assigned salience scores should represent the influence of the corresponding input pixels on the model's predictions. To evaluate faithfulness, we introduce Salience-guided Faithfulness Coefficient (SaCo), a novel evaluation metric leveraging essential information of salience distribution. Specifically, we conduct pair-wise comparisons among distinct pixel groups and then aggregate the differences in their salience scores, resulting in a coefficient that indicates the explanation's degree of faithfulness. Our explorations reveal that current metrics struggle to differentiate between advanced explanation methods and Random Attribution, thereby failing to capture the faithfulness property. In contrast, our proposed SaCo offers a reliable faithfulness measurement, establishing a robust metric for interpretations. Furthermore, our SaCo demonstrates that the use of gradient and multi-layer aggregation can markedly enhance the faithfulness of attention-based explanation, shedding light on potential paths for advancing Vision Transformer explainability.

Inf2Guard: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Learning Privacy-Preserving Representations against Inference Attacks

Machine learning (ML) is vulnerable to inference (e.g., membership inference, property inference, and data reconstruction) attacks that aim to infer the private information of training data or dataset. Existing defenses are only designed for one specific type of attack and sacrifice significant utility or are soon broken by adaptive attacks. We address these limitations by proposing an information-theoretic defense framework, called Inf2Guard, against the three major types of inference attacks. Our framework, inspired by the success of representation learning, posits that learning shared representations not only saves time/costs but also benefits numerous downstream tasks. Generally, Inf2Guard involves two mutual information objectives, for privacy protection and utility preservation, respectively. Inf2Guard exhibits many merits: it facilitates the design of customized objectives against the specific inference attack; it provides a general defense framework which can treat certain existing defenses as special cases; and importantly, it aids in deriving theoretical results, e.g., inherent utility-privacy tradeoff and guaranteed privacy leakage. Extensive evaluations validate the effectiveness of Inf2Guard for learning privacy-preserving representations against inference attacks and demonstrate the superiority over the baselines.

FLTracer: Accurate Poisoning Attack Provenance in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning approach that enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared global model. However, recent studies show that FL is vulnerable to various poisoning attacks, which can degrade the performance of global models or introduce backdoors into them. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive study on prior FL attacks and detection methods. The results show that all existing detection methods are only effective against limited and specific attacks. Most detection methods suffer from high false positives, which lead to significant performance degradation, especially in not independent and identically distributed (non-IID) settings. To address these issues, we propose FLTracer, the first FL attack provenance framework to accurately detect various attacks and trace the attack time, objective, type, and poisoned location of updates. Different from existing methodologies that rely solely on cross-client anomaly detection, we propose a Kalman filter-based cross-round detection to identify adversaries by seeking the behavior changes before and after the attack. Thus, this makes it resilient to data heterogeneity and is effective even in non-IID settings. To further improve the accuracy of our detection method, we employ four novel features and capture their anomalies with the joint decisions. Extensive evaluations show that FLTracer achieves an average true positive rate of over $96.88\%$ at an average false positive rate of less than $2.67\%$, significantly outperforming SOTA detection methods. \footnote{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Eyr3/FLTracer}.}

Text-CRS: A Generalized Certified Robustness Framework against Textual Adversarial Attacks

The language models, especially the basic text classification models, have been shown to be susceptible to textual adversarial attacks such as synonym substitution and word insertion attacks. To defend against such attacks, a growing body of research has been devoted to improving the model robustness. However, providing provable robustness guarantees instead of empirical robustness is still widely unexplored. In this paper, we propose Text-CRS, a generalized certified robustness framework for natural language processing (NLP) based on randomized smoothing. To our best knowledge, existing certified schemes for NLP can only certify the robustness against $\ell_0$ perturbations in synonym substitution attacks. Representing each word-level adversarial operation (i.e., synonym substitution, word reordering, insertion, and deletion) as a combination of permutation and embedding transformation, we propose novel smoothing theorems to derive robustness bounds in both permutation and embedding space against such adversarial operations. To further improve certified accuracy and radius, we consider the numerical relationships between discrete words and select proper noise distributions for the randomized smoothing. Finally, we conduct substantial experiments on multiple language models and datasets. Text-CRS can address all four different word-level adversarial operations and achieve a significant accuracy improvement. We also provide the first benchmark on certified accuracy and radius of four word-level operations, besides outperforming the state-of-the-art certification against synonym substitution attacks.

Certifiable Black-Box Attack: Ensuring Provably Successful Attack for Adversarial Examples

Black-box adversarial attacks have shown strong potential to subvert machine learning models. Existing black-box adversarial attacks craft the adversarial examples by iteratively querying the target model and/or leveraging the transferability of a local surrogate model. Whether such attack can succeed remains unknown to the adversary when empirically designing the attack. In this paper, to our best knowledge, we take the first step to study a new paradigm of adversarial attacks -- certifiable black-box attack that can guarantee the attack success rate of the crafted adversarial examples. Specifically, we revise the randomized smoothing to establish novel theories for ensuring the attack success rate of the adversarial examples. To craft the adversarial examples with the certifiable attack success rate (CASR) guarantee, we design several novel techniques, including a randomized query method to query the target model, an initialization method with smoothed self-supervised perturbation to derive certifiable adversarial examples, and a geometric shifting method to reduce the perturbation size of the certifiable adversarial examples for better imperceptibility. We have comprehensively evaluated the performance of the certifiable black-box attack on CIFAR10 and ImageNet datasets against different levels of defenses. Both theoretical and experimental results have validated the effectiveness of the proposed certifiable attack.

OpBoost: A Vertical Federated Tree Boosting Framework Based on Order-Preserving Desensitization

Vertical Federated Learning (FL) is a new paradigm that enables users with non-overlapping attributes of the same data samples to jointly train a model without directly sharing the raw data. Nevertheless, recent works show that it's still not sufficient to prevent privacy leakage from the training process or the trained model. This paper focuses on studying the privacy-preserving tree boosting algorithms under the vertical FL. The existing solutions based on cryptography involve heavy computation and communication overhead and are vulnerable to inference attacks. Although the solution based on Local Differential Privacy (LDP) addresses the above problems, it leads to the low accuracy of the trained model. This paper explores to improve the accuracy of the widely deployed tree boosting algorithms satisfying differential privacy under vertical FL. Specifically, we introduce a framework called OpBoost. Three order-preserving desensitization algorithms satisfying a variant of LDP called distance-based LDP (dLDP) are designed to desensitize the training data. In particular, we optimize the dLDP definition and study efficient sampling distributions to further improve the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. The proposed algorithms provide a trade-off between the privacy of pairs with large distance and the utility of desensitized values. Comprehensive evaluations show that OpBoost has a better performance on prediction accuracy of trained models compared with existing LDP approaches on reasonable settings. Our code is open source.

On Fair Classification with Mostly Private Sensitive Attributes

Machine learning models have demonstrated promising performance in many areas. However, the concerns that they can be biased against specific groups hinder their adoption in high-stake applications. Thus it is essential to ensure fairness in machine learning models. Most of the previous efforts require access to sensitive attributes for mitigating bias. Nonetheless, it is often infeasible to obtain large scale of data with sensitive attributes due to people's increasing awareness of privacy and the legal compliance. Therefore, an important research question is how to make fair predictions under privacy? In this paper, we study a novel problem on fair classification in a semi-private setting, where most of the sensitive attributes are private and only a small amount of clean sensitive attributes are available. To this end, we propose a novel framework FairSP that can first learn to correct the noisy sensitive attributes under privacy guarantee via exploiting the limited clean sensitive attributes. Then, it jointly models the corrected and clean data in an adversarial way for debiasing and prediction. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed model can ensure fairness when most of the sensitive attributes are private. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for making fair predictions under privacy and maintaining high accuracy.

Certified Adversarial Robustness via Anisotropic Randomized Smoothing

Randomized smoothing has achieved great success for certified robustness against adversarial perturbations. Given any arbitrary classifier, randomized smoothing can guarantee the classifier's prediction over the perturbed input with provable robustness bound by injecting noise into the classifier. However, all of the existing methods rely on fixed i.i.d. probability distribution to generate noise for all dimensions of the data (e.g., all the pixels in an image), which ignores the heterogeneity of inputs and data dimensions. Thus, existing randomized smoothing methods cannot provide optimal protection for all the inputs. To address this limitation, we propose the first anisotropic randomized smoothing method which ensures provable robustness guarantee based on pixel-wise noise distributions. Also, we design a novel CNN-based noise generator to efficiently fine-tune the pixel-wise noise distributions for all the pixels in each input. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art randomized smoothing methods.

UniCR: Universally Approximated Certified Robustness via Randomized Smoothing

We study certified robustness of machine learning classifiers against adversarial perturbations. In particular, we propose the first universally approximated certified robustness (UniCR) framework, which can approximate the robustness certification of any input on any classifier against any $\ell_p$ perturbations with noise generated by any continuous probability distribution. Compared with the state-of-the-art certified defenses, UniCR provides many significant benefits: (1) the first universal robustness certification framework for the above 4 'any's; (2) automatic robustness certification that avoids case-by-case analysis, (3) tightness validation of certified robustness, and (4) optimality validation of noise distributions used by randomized smoothing. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the above benefits of UniCR and the advantages of UniCR over state-of-the-art certified defenses against $\ell_p$ perturbations.