Post-processing immunity is a fundamental property of differential privacy: it enables arbitrary data-independent transformations to differentially private outputs without affecting their privacy guarantees. Post-processing is routinely applied in data-release applications, including census data, which are then used to make allocations with substantial societal impacts. This paper shows that post-processing causes disparate impacts on individuals or groups and analyzes two critical settings: the release of differentially private datasets and the use of such private datasets for downstream decisions, such as the allocation of funds informed by US Census data. In the first setting, the paper proposes tight bounds on the unfairness of traditional post-processing mechanisms, giving a unique tool to decision-makers to quantify the disparate impacts introduced by their release. In the second setting, this paper proposes a novel post-processing mechanism that is (approximately) optimal under different fairness metrics, either reducing fairness issues substantially or reducing the cost of privacy. The theoretical analysis is complemented with numerical simulations on Census data.
Data collection and research methodology represents a critical part of the research pipeline. On the one hand, it is important that we collect data in a way that maximises the validity of what we are measuring, which may involve the use of long scales with many items. On the other hand, collecting a large number of items across multiple scales results in participant fatigue, and expensive and time consuming data collection. It is therefore important that we use the available resources optimally. In this work, we consider how a consideration for theory and the associated causal/structural model can help us to streamline data collection procedures by not wasting time collecting data for variables which are not causally critical for subsequent analysis. This not only saves time and enables us to redirect resources to attend to other variables which are more important, but also increases research transparency and the reliability of theory testing. In order to achieve this streamlined data collection, we leverage structural models, and Markov conditional independency structures implicit in these models to identify the substructures which are critical for answering a particular research question. In this work, we review the relevant concepts and present a number of didactic examples with the hope that psychologists can use these techniques to streamline their data collection process without invalidating the subsequent analysis. We provide a number of simulation results to demonstrate the limited analytical impact of this streamlining.
The emerging public awareness and government regulations of data privacy motivate new paradigms of collecting and analyzing data that are transparent and acceptable to data owners. We present a new concept of privacy and corresponding data formats, mechanisms, and theories for privatizing data during data collection. The privacy, named Interval Privacy, enforces the raw data conditional distribution on the privatized data to be the same as its unconditional distribution over a nontrivial support set. Correspondingly, the proposed privacy mechanism will record each data value as a random interval (or, more generally, a range) containing it. The proposed interval privacy mechanisms can be easily deployed through survey-based data collection interfaces, e.g., by asking a respondent whether its data value is within a randomly generated range. Another unique feature of interval mechanisms is that they obfuscate the truth but do not perturb it. Using narrowed range to convey information is complementary to the popular paradigm of perturbing data. Also, the interval mechanisms can generate progressively refined information at the discretion of individuals, naturally leading to privacy-adaptive data collection. We develop different aspects of theory such as composition, robustness, distribution estimation, and regression learning from interval-valued data. Interval privacy provides a new perspective of human-centric data privacy where individuals have a perceptible, transparent, and simple way of sharing sensitive data.
As machine learning algorithms become increasingly integrated in crucial decision-making scenarios, such as healthcare, recruitment, and risk assessment, there have been increasing concerns about the privacy and fairness of such systems. Federated learning has been viewed as a promising solution for collaboratively training of machine learning models among multiple parties while maintaining the privacy of their local data. However, federated learning also poses new challenges in mitigating the potential bias against certain populations (e.g., demographic groups), as this typically requires centralized access to the sensitive information (e.g., race, gender) of each data point. Motivated by the importance and challenges of group fairness in federated learning, in this work, we propose FairFed, a novel algorithm to enhance group fairness via a fairness-aware aggregation method, which aims to provide fair model performance across different sensitive groups (e.g., racial, gender groups) while maintaining high utility. This formulation can further provide more flexibility in the customized local debiasing strategies for each client. We build our FairFed algorithm around the secure aggregation protocol of federated learning. When running federated training on widely investigated fairness datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art fair federated learning frameworks under a high heterogeneous sensitive attribute distribution. We also investigate the performance of FairFed on naturally distributed real-life data collected from different geographical locations or departments within an organization.
Privacy protection is an essential issue in personalized news recommendation, and federated learning can potentially mitigate the privacy concern by training personalized news recommendation models over decentralized user data.For a theoretical privacy guarantee, differential privacy is necessary. However, applying differential privacy to federated recommendation training and serving conventionally suffers from the unsatisfactory trade-off between privacy and utility due to the high-dimensional characteristics of model gradients and hidden representations. In addition, there is no formal privacy guarantee for both training and serving in federated recommendation. In this paper, we propose a unified federated news recommendation method for effective and privacy-preserving model training and online serving with differential privacy guarantees. We first clarify the notion of differential privacy over users' behavior data for both model training and online serving in the federated recommendation scenario. Next, we propose a privacy-preserving online serving mechanism under this definition with differentially private user interest decomposition. More specifically, it decomposes the high-dimensional and privacy-sensitive user embedding into a combination of public basic vectors and adds noise to the combination coefficients. In this way, it can avoid the dimension curse and improve the utility by reducing the required noise intensity for differential privacy. Besides, we design a federated recommendation model training method with differential privacy, which can avoid the dimension-dependent noise for large models via label permutation and differentially private attention modules. Experiments on real-world news recommendation datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in achieving a good trade-off between privacy protection and utility for federated news recommendations.
The concept of federated learning (FL) was first proposed by Google in 2016. Thereafter, FL has been widely studied for the feasibility of application in various fields due to its potential to make full use of data without compromising the privacy. However, limited by the capacity of wireless data transmission, the employment of federated learning on mobile devices has been making slow progress in practical. The development and commercialization of the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks has shed some light on this. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of existing federated learning schemes for mobile devices and propose a novel cross-device federated learning framework, which utilizes the anonymous communication technology and ring signature to protect the privacy of participants while reducing the computation overhead of mobile devices participating in FL. In addition, our scheme implements a contribution-based incentive mechanism to encourage mobile users to participate in FL. We also give a case study of autonomous driving. Finally, we present the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme and discuss some open issues in federated learning.
With the increasing adoption of NLP models in real-world products, it becomes more and more important to protect these models from privacy leakage. Because private information in language data is sparse, previous research formalized a Selective-Differential-Privacy (SDP) notion to provide protection for sensitive tokens detected by policy functions, and prove its effectiveness on RNN-based models. But the previous mechanism requires separating the private and public model parameters and thus cannot be applied on large attention-based models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective just-fine-tune-twice privacy mechanism to first fine-tune on in-domain redacted data and then on in-domain private data, to achieve SDP for large Transformer-based language models. We also design explicit and contextual policy functions to provide protections at different levels. Experiments show that our models achieve strong performance while staying robust to the canary insertion attack. We further show that even under low-resource settings with a small amount of in-domain data, SDP can still improve the model utility. We will release the code, data and models to facilitate future research.
One of the most important problems in system identification and statistics is how to estimate the unknown parameters of a given model. Optimization methods and specialized procedures, such as Empirical Minimization (EM) can be used in case the likelihood function can be computed. For situations where one can only simulate from a parametric model, but the likelihood is difficult or impossible to evaluate, a technique known as the Two-Stage (TS) Approach can be applied to obtain reliable parametric estimates. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of theoretical justification for TS. In this paper, we propose a statistical decision-theoretical derivation of TS, which leads to Bayesian and Minimax estimators. We also show how to apply the TS approach on models for independent and identically distributed samples, by computing quantiles of the data as a first step, and using a linear function as the second stage. The proposed method is illustrated via numerical simulations.
We propose a novel federated learning paradigm to model data variability among heterogeneous clients in multi-centric studies. Our method is expressed through a hierarchical Bayesian latent variable model, where client-specific parameters are assumed to be realization from a global distribution at the master level, which is in turn estimated to account for data bias and variability across clients. We show that our framework can be effectively optimized through expectation maximization (EM) over latent master's distribution and clients' parameters. We also introduce formal differential privacy (DP) guarantees compatibly with our EM optimization scheme. We tested our method on the analysis of multi-modal medical imaging data and clinical scores from distributed clinical datasets of patients affected by Alzheimer's disease. We demonstrate that our method is robust when data is distributed either in iid and non-iid manners, even when local parameters perturbation is included to provide DP guarantees. Moreover, the variability of data, views and centers can be quantified in an interpretable manner, while guaranteeing high-quality data reconstruction as compared to state-of-the-art autoencoding models and federated learning schemes. The code is available at //gitlab.inria.fr/epione/federated-multi-views-ppca.
Federated learning with differential privacy, or private federated learning, provides a strategy to train machine learning models while respecting users' privacy. However, differential privacy can disproportionately degrade the performance of the models on under-represented groups, as these parts of the distribution are difficult to learn in the presence of noise. Existing approaches for enforcing fairness in machine learning models have considered the centralized setting, in which the algorithm has access to the users' data. This paper introduces an algorithm to enforce group fairness in private federated learning, where users' data does not leave their devices. First, the paper extends the modified method of differential multipliers to empirical risk minimization with fairness constraints, thus providing an algorithm to enforce fairness in the central setting. Then, this algorithm is extended to the private federated learning setting. The proposed algorithm, \texttt{FPFL}, is tested on a federated version of the Adult dataset and an "unfair" version of the FEMNIST dataset. The experiments on these datasets show how private federated learning accentuates unfairness in the trained models, and how FPFL is able to mitigate such unfairness.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.