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Poster
Trade-offs and Guarantees of Adversarial Representation Learning for Information Obfuscation
Han Zhao · Jianfeng Chi · Yuan Tian · Geoffrey Gordon

Wed Dec 09 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Poster Session 3 #1066
in Poster Session 4 »

Crowdsourced data used in machine learning services might carry sensitive information about attributes that users do not want to share. Various methods have been proposed to minimize the potential information leakage of sensitive attributes while maximizing the task accuracy. However, little is known about the theory behind these methods. In light of this gap, we develop a novel theoretical framework for attribute obfuscation. Under our framework, we propose a minimax optimization formulation to protect the given attribute and analyze its inference guarantees against worst-case adversaries. Meanwhile, there is a tension between minimizing information leakage and maximizing task accuracy. To understand this, we prove an information-theoretic lower bound to precisely characterize the fundamental trade-off between accuracy and information leakage. We conduct experiments on two real-world datasets to corroborate the inference guarantees and validate the inherent trade-offs therein. Our results indicate that, among several alternatives, the adversarial learning approach achieves the best trade-off in terms of attribute obfuscation and accuracy maximization.

Author Information

Han Zhao (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Jianfeng Chi (University of Virginia)
Yuan Tian (University of Virginia)
Geoffrey Gordon (MSR Montréal & CMU)

Dr. Gordon is an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University, and co-director of the Department's Ph. D. program. He works on multi-robot systems, statistical machine learning, game theory, and planning in probabilistic, adversarial, and general-sum domains. His previous appointments include Visiting Professor at the Stanford Computer Science Department and Principal Scientist at Burning Glass Technologies in San Diego. Dr. Gordon received his B.A. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1991, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999.

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