Differential Privacy (DP) has emerged as a rigorous formalism to reason about quantifiable privacy leakage. In machine learning (ML), DP has been employed to limit inference/disclosure of training examples. Prior work leveraged DP across the ML pipeline, albeit in isolation, often focusing on mechanisms such as gradient perturbation. In this paper, we present, DP-UTIL, a holistic utility analysis framework of DP across the ML pipeline with focus on input perturbation, objective perturbation, gradient perturbation, output perturbation, and prediction perturbation. Given an ML task on privacy-sensitive data, DP-UTIL enables a ML privacy practitioner perform holistic comparative analysis on the impact of DP in these five perturbation spots, measured in terms of model utility loss, privacy leakage, and the number of truly revealed training samples. We evaluate DP-UTIL over classification tasks on vision, medical, and financial datasets, using two representative learning algorithms (logistic regression and deep neural network) against membership inference attack as a case study attack. One of the highlights of our results is that prediction perturbation consistently achieves the lowest utility loss on all models across all datasets. In logistic regression models, objective perturbation results in lowest privacy leakage compared to other perturbation techniques. For deep neural networks, gradient perturbation results in lowest privacy leakage. Moreover, our results on true revealed records suggest that as privacy leakage increases a differentially private model reveals more number of member samples. Overall, our findings suggest that to make informed decisions as to which perturbation mechanism to use, a ML privacy practitioner needs to examine the dynamics between optimization techniques (convex vs. non-convex), perturbation mechanisms, number of classes, and privacy budget.
We present a data-efficient framework for solving sequential decision-making problems which exploits the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and latent variable generative models. The framework, called GenRL, trains deep policies by introducing an action latent variable such that the feed-forward policy search can be divided into two parts: (i) training a sub-policy that outputs a distribution over the action latent variable given a state of the system, and (ii) unsupervised training of a generative model that outputs a sequence of motor actions conditioned on the latent action variable. GenRL enables safe exploration and alleviates the data-inefficiency problem as it exploits prior knowledge about valid sequences of motor actions. Moreover, we provide a set of measures for evaluation of generative models such that we are able to predict the performance of the RL policy training prior to the actual training on a physical robot. We experimentally determine the characteristics of generative models that have most influence on the performance of the final policy training on two robotics tasks: shooting a hockey puck and throwing a basketball. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that GenRL is the only method which can safely and efficiently solve the robotics tasks compared to two state-of-the-art RL methods.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made rapid developments in the recent years. Due to their great ability in modeling graph-structured data, GNNs are vastly used in various applications, including high-stakes scenarios such as financial analysis, traffic predictions, and drug discovery. Despite their great potential in benefiting humans in the real world, recent study shows that GNNs can leak private information, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, can inherit and magnify societal bias from training data and lack interpretability, which have risk of causing unintentional harm to the users and society. For example, existing works demonstrate that attackers can fool the GNNs to give the outcome they desire with unnoticeable perturbation on training graph. GNNs trained on social networks may embed the discrimination in their decision process, strengthening the undesirable societal bias. Consequently, trustworthy GNNs in various aspects are emerging to prevent the harm from GNN models and increase the users' trust in GNNs. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of GNNs in the computational aspects of privacy, robustness, fairness, and explainability. For each aspect, we give the taxonomy of the related methods and formulate the general frameworks for the multiple categories of trustworthy GNNs. We also discuss the future research directions of each aspect and connections between these aspects to help achieve trustworthiness.
In this work, we study the transfer learning problem under high-dimensional generalized linear models (GLMs), which aim to improve the fit on target data by borrowing information from useful source data. Given which sources to transfer, we propose a transfer learning algorithm on GLM, and derive its $\ell_1/\ell_2$-estimation error bounds as well as a bound for a prediction error measure. The theoretical analysis shows that when the target and source are sufficiently close to each other, these bounds could be improved over those of the classical penalized estimator using only target data under mild conditions. When we don't know which sources to transfer, an algorithm-free transferable source detection approach is introduced to detect informative sources. The detection consistency is proved under the high-dimensional GLM transfer learning setting. We also propose an algorithm to construct confidence intervals of each coefficient component, and the corresponding theories are provided. Extensive simulations and a real-data experiment verify the effectiveness of our algorithms. We implement the proposed GLM transfer learning algorithms in a new R package glmtrans, which is available on CRAN.
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.
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.
Neural networks have shown tremendous growth in recent years to solve numerous problems. Various types of neural networks have been introduced to deal with different types of problems. However, the main goal of any neural network is to transform the non-linearly separable input data into more linearly separable abstract features using a hierarchy of layers. These layers are combinations of linear and nonlinear functions. The most popular and common non-linearity layers are activation functions (AFs), such as Logistic Sigmoid, Tanh, ReLU, ELU, Swish and Mish. In this paper, a comprehensive overview and survey is presented for AFs in neural networks for deep learning. Different classes of AFs such as Logistic Sigmoid and Tanh based, ReLU based, ELU based, and Learning based are covered. Several characteristics of AFs such as output range, monotonicity, and smoothness are also pointed out. A performance comparison is also performed among 18 state-of-the-art AFs with different networks on different types of data. The insights of AFs are presented to benefit the researchers for doing further research and practitioners to select among different choices. The code used for experimental comparison is released at: \url{//github.com/shivram1987/ActivationFunctions}.
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.
The difficulty of deploying various deep learning (DL) models on diverse DL hardwares has boosted the research and development of DL compilers in the community. Several DL compilers have been proposed from both industry and academia such as Tensorflow XLA and TVM. Similarly, the DL compilers take the DL models described in different DL frameworks as input, and then generate optimized codes for diverse DL hardwares as output. However, none of the existing survey has analyzed the unique design of the DL compilers comprehensively. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive survey of existing DL compilers by dissecting the commonly adopted design in details, with emphasis on the DL oriented multi-level IRs, and frontend/backend optimizations. Specifically, we provide a comprehensive comparison among existing DL compilers from various aspects. In addition, we present detailed analysis of the multi-level IR design and compiler optimization techniques. Finally, several insights are highlighted as the potential research directions of DL compiler. This is the first survey paper focusing on the unique design of DL compiler, which we hope can pave the road for future research towards the DL compiler.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.