Locally differentially private (LDP) graph analysis allows private analysis on a graph that is distributed across multiple users. However, such computations are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks where an adversary can skew the results by submitting malformed data. In this paper, we formally study the impact of poisoning attacks for graph degree estimation protocols under LDP. We make two key technical contributions. First, we observe LDP makes a protocol more vulnerable to poisoning -- the impact of poisoning is worse when the adversary can directly poison their (noisy) responses, rather than their input data. Second, we observe that graph data is naturally redundant -- every edge is shared between two users. Leveraging this data redundancy, we design robust degree estimation protocols under LDP that can significantly reduce the impact of data poisoning and compute degree estimates with high accuracy. We evaluate our proposed robust degree estimation protocols under poisoning attacks on real-world datasets to demonstrate their efficacy in practice.
Collecting and training over sensitive personal data raise severe privacy concerns in personalized recommendation systems, and federated learning can potentially alleviate the problem by training models over decentralized user data.However, a theoretically private solution in both the training and serving stages of federated recommendation is essential but still lacking.Furthermore, naively applying differential privacy (DP) to the two stages in federated recommendation would fail to achieve a satisfactory trade-off between privacy and utility due to the high-dimensional characteristics of model gradients and hidden representations.In this work, we propose a federated news recommendation method for achieving a better utility in model training and online serving under a DP guarantee.We first clarify the DP definition over behavior data for each round in the life-circle of federated recommendation systems.Next, we propose a privacy-preserving online serving mechanism under this definition based on the idea of decomposing user embeddings with public basic vectors and perturbing the lower-dimensional combination coefficients. We apply a random behavior padding mechanism to reduce the required noise intensity for better utility. Besides, we design a federated recommendation model training method, which can generate effective and public basic vectors for serving while providing DP for training participants. We avoid the dimension-dependent noise for large models via label permutation and differentially private attention modules. Experiments on real-world news recommendation datasets validate that our method achieves superior utility under a DP guarantee in both training and serving of federated news recommendations.
Differential privacy provides a strong form of privacy and allows preserving most original characteristics of the data set. Utilizing these benefits requires one to design specific differentially private data analysis algorithms. In this work, we present three tree-based algorithms for mining redescriptions while preserving differential privacy. Redescription mining is an exploratory data analysis method for finding connections between two views over the same entities, such as phenotypes and genotypes of medical patients, for example. It has applications in many fields, including some, like health care informatics, where privacy-preserving access to data is desired. Our algorithms are the first differentially private redescription mining algorithms, and we show via experiments that, despite the inherent noise in differential privacy, it can return trustworthy results even in smaller data sets where noise typically has a stronger effect.
Recent development in the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has helped improve trust in Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) systems, in which an explanation is provided together with the model prediction in response to each query. However, XAI also opens a door for adversaries to gain insights into the black-box models in MLaaS, thereby making the models more vulnerable to several attacks. For example, feature-based explanations (e.g., SHAP) could expose the top important features that a black-box model focuses on. Such disclosure has been exploited to craft effective backdoor triggers against malware classifiers. To address this trade-off, we introduce a new concept of achieving local differential privacy (LDP) in the explanations, and from that we establish a defense, called XRand, against such attacks. We show that our mechanism restricts the information that the adversary can learn about the top important features, while maintaining the faithfulness of the explanations.
We present new methods for assessing the privacy guarantees of an algorithm with regard to R\'enyi Differential Privacy. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to address this problem in a black-box scenario, where only algorithmic outputs are available. To quantify privacy leakage, we devise a new estimator for the R\'enyi divergence of a pair of output distributions. This estimator is transformed into a statistical lower bound that is proven to hold for large samples with high probability. Our method is applicable for a broad class of algorithms, including many well-known examples from the privacy literature. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by experiments encompassing algorithms and privacy enhancing methods that have not been considered in related works.
Models trained via empirical risk minimization (ERM) are known to rely on spurious correlations between labels and task-independent input features, resulting in poor generalization to distributional shifts. Group distributionally robust optimization (G-DRO) can alleviate this problem by minimizing the worst-case loss over a set of pre-defined groups over training data. G-DRO successfully improves performance of the worst-group, where the correlation does not hold. However, G-DRO assumes that the spurious correlations and associated worst groups are known in advance, making it challenging to apply it to new tasks with potentially multiple unknown spurious correlations. We propose AGRO -- Adversarial Group discovery for Distributionally Robust Optimization -- an end-to-end approach that jointly identifies error-prone groups and improves accuracy on them. AGRO equips G-DRO with an adversarial slicing model to find a group assignment for training examples which maximizes worst-case loss over the discovered groups. On the WILDS benchmark, AGRO results in 8% higher model performance on average on known worst-groups, compared to prior group discovery approaches used with G-DRO. AGRO also improves out-of-distribution performance on SST2, QQP, and MS-COCO -- datasets where potential spurious correlations are as yet uncharacterized. Human evaluation of ARGO groups shows that they contain well-defined, yet previously unstudied spurious correlations that lead to model errors.
Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.
As data are increasingly being stored in different silos and societies becoming more aware of data privacy issues, the traditional centralized training of artificial intelligence (AI) models is facing efficiency and privacy challenges. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an alternative solution and continue to thrive in this new reality. Existing FL protocol design has been shown to be vulnerable to adversaries within or outside of the system, compromising data privacy and system robustness. Besides training powerful global models, it is of paramount importance to design FL systems that have privacy guarantees and are resistant to different types of adversaries. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on this topic. Through a concise introduction to the concept of FL, and a unique taxonomy covering: 1) threat models; 2) poisoning attacks and defenses against robustness; 3) inference attacks and defenses against privacy, we provide an accessible review of this important topic. We highlight the intuitions, key techniques as well as fundamental assumptions adopted by various attacks and defenses. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions towards robust and privacy-preserving federated learning.
Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, various studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. For instance, the attacker has poisoning and evasion attack, and the defense group correspondingly has preprocessing- and adversarial- based methods. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r.t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give proper definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, and investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can serve as a reference for the relevant researchers, thus providing assistance for their studies. More details of our works are available at //github.com/gitgiter/Graph-Adversarial-Learning.