Towards Trustworthy ML:
Rethinking Security and Privacy for ML
ICLR 2020 Workshop
Date: April 26, 2020 (Sunday)
Location: Millennium Hall, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (co-located with ICLR 2020)
Contact: trustworthyiclr20@googlegroups.com (this will email all organizers)
Room: TBD
Abstract—As ML systems are pervasively deployed, security and privacy challenges became central to their design. The community produced a vast amount of work to address these challenges and increase trust in ML. Yet, much of it concentrates on well-defined problems that enable nice tractability from a mathematical perspective but are hard to translate to the threats that target real-world systems.
This workshop calls for novel research that addresses the security and privacy risks arising from the deployment of ML, from malicious exploitation of vulnerabilities (e.g., adversarial examples or data poisoning) to concerns on fair, ethical and privacy-preserving uses of data. We aim to provide a home to new ideas “outside the box”, even if proposed preliminary solutions do not match the performance guarantees of known techniques. We believe that such ideas could prove invaluable to more effectively spur new lines of research that make ML more trustworthy.
We aim to bring together experts from a variety of communities (ML, computer security, data privacy, fairness & ethics) in an effort to synthesize promising ideas and research directions, as well as foster and strengthen cross-community collaborations. Indeed, many fundamental problems studied in these diverse areas can be broadly recast as questions around the (in-)stability of ML models: generalization in ML, model memorization in privacy, adversarial examples in security, model bias in fairness and ethics, etc. Problems that we hope to encourage progress on are:
(#1) Adversarial robustness beyond Lp balls. Recent years have seen a tremendous amount of research devoted to making ML models robust to small test-time perturbations sampled adversarially from an Lp-ball. While seemingly simple, this has proven a difficult challenge that remains mostly unsolved today. Yet, even if robustness in an Lp ball were to be achieved, complete model robustness would still be far from guaranteed. We encourage researchers to move beyond this “toy” problem to characterize the robustness of real-world systems for which adversarial examples pose a threat (e.g., malware detection, visual ad-blocking, voice assistants, etc...). We hope that specificities of these systems and of their deployments may point towards alternative—and more easily attainable—avenues towards secure inference.
(#2) Stateful robustness. Current adversarial example research focuses on securing a classifier for all possible use cases. This has proven to be extremely difficult and to date few solutions come close. However, when deployed, ML classifiers are not stateless systems that must respond to arbitrary inputs. Can we make use of additional knowledge (e.g., by making the classifier stateful, or by tailoring the defense to be deployed in one setting) which improves our ability to design defenses? Further, it might also be useful to think about ways to ensure graceful degradation of classifier performance in critical applications. For instance, instead of aiming to obtain robust classifiers that always accurately predict, it might be sufficient to get models that can fail gracefully (e.g., say “don’t know” or “the class is either cat or dog”).
(#3) ML techniques tailored for privacy. Current approaches in the literature “tailor” privacy solutions to ML. Whether based on cryptography (e.g., homomorphic encryption) or statistical tools (e.g., differential privacy), they often aim to add privacy to existing ML techniques. We believe that the orthogonal approach, of designing new ML models or algorithms that are better suited for privacy-preserving techniques, is heavily underrepresented. We hope to encourage preliminary explorations in this space, even if they currently fail to reach state-of-the-art results.
(#4) Incentives in ML fairness and ethics. Current approaches to ML fairness and ethics assume that the ML model owner is willing to collaborate and implement proposed solutions. However, the owner does not always have the incentives, the knowledge, or the means, to implement these solutions. We encourage the community to think about solutions that consider the model owner as adversarial and attempt to increase fairness “from the outside” of the model, e.g., modifying its inputs during training or inference. As part of this reflection, we hope submissions to the workshop will challenge existing definitions of ethics in machine learning.
(#5) Friendly uses of adversarial ML. Adversarial ML is usually considered negative. This stems from the assumption that model owners are honest and ethical. However, ML is deployed in many real-world scenarios with questionable motives (e.g., privacy-invasive applications, social sorting). In such scenarios, adversarial machine learning may become a golden standard to protect users and communities. We welcome applications of adversarial techniques used to build solutions that help combating unethical machine learning applications.
Sponsor
Thank you to the Open Philanthropy Project for sponsoring this event. Their grant will fund a best paper award as well as support for travel.
Call For Papers
Submission deadline: February 12th, 2020 Anywhere on Earth (AoE)
Notification sent to authors: February 25, 2020
Submission server: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICLRTML2020/
The workshop will include contributed papers. Based on the PC’s recommendation, each paper accepted to the workshop will be allocated either a contributed talk or a poster presentation (with a lightning talk).
Submitted papers are expected to introduce novel ideas or results. Submissions should follow the ICLR format and not exceed 4 pages (excluding references, appendices or large figures).
Work that has been previously published (including in the ICLR 2020 main conference) will not be accepted at the workshop.
We invite submissions on any aspect of machine learning that relates to computer security (and vice versa). This includes, but is not limited to:
- Adversarial Robustness: New approaches that may be risky and are different than the existing literature. Reviewers will pay special attention to the stated threat models and its motivation. Threat models beyond Lp norms are encouraged.
- Real-world attacks: Apply an existing known (academic) threat to a deployed-in-production system to show how it fails.
- Training time attacks and defenses Develop new approaches that study the threat model where the adversary has access to the training data or algorithm.
- Evaluating privacy of models: Better and broader quantification methods to measure to what extent models trained on sensitive data reveal their training data.
- ML algorithms for private learning: new ML models or algorithms that are better suited for privacy-preserving techniques, rather than retroactively adapt existing ML algorithms to be private.
- Alternate uses of secure and private learning: Evaluate other benefits of training models to be robust or private.
- Unintended consequences of secure or private learning Find unintended consequences of training robust or private models, e.g., on fairness.
- Evaluating stealing robustness New methods to quantify the difficulty of stealing trained ML models and develop defenses against it.
- Ethical machine learning Definitions and applications of ethics when considering security and privacy aspects in machine learning.
- Fresh look on incentives in ML: Solutions that consider the model owner as adversarial and attempt to increase privacy, fairness, equality, etc “from the outside” of the model.
- Foundations for secure or private learning: Introduce proposals for formal foundations of secure or private learning
- Position papers: State a new controversial positions or a research agendas that areis under-studied.
When relevant, submissions are encouraged to clearly state their threat model, release open-source code and take particular care in conducting ethical research. Reviewing will be performed in a single-blind fashion (reviewers will be anonymous but not authors). Reviewing criteria include (a) relevance, (b) quality of the methodology and experiments, (c) originality.
This workshop will not have proceedings.
Contact trustworthyiclr20@googlegroups.com for any questions.
Schedule
TBAOrganizing Committee
Nicolas Papernot
[Chair]
University of Toronto and Vector Institute
Florian Tramer
[Co-chair]
Stanford University
Carmela Troncoso
EPFL
Nicholas Carlini
Google Brain
Shibani Santurkar
MIT
Program Committee
- Adria Gascon (The Alan Turing Institute)
- Akshayvarun Subramanya (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
- Anand Sarwate (Rutgers University)
- Aniruddha Saha (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
- Anish Athalye (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- Asia Biega (Max Planck Institute for Informatics)
- Aurélien Bellet (INRIA)
- Aylin Caliskan (George Washington University)
- Berkay Celik (Purdue University)
- Bogdan Kulynych (EPFL)
- Catuscia Palamidessi (Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique)
- Congzheng Song (Cornell University)
- Dan Hendrycks (UC Berkeley)
- Dimitris Tsipras (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- Earlence Fernandes (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- Eric Wong (Carnegie Mellon University)
- Fartash Faghri (University of Toronto)
- Giovanni Cherubin (EPFL)
- Hadi Salman (Microsoft research)
- Jamie Hayes (University College London)
- Jason Martin (Intel Corporation)
- Jerry Li (Microsoft Research)
- Jonas Rauber (Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems)
- Julius Adebayo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- Kassem Fawaz (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- Kathrin Grosse (CISPA Helmholtz Center / SIC)
- Kristian Lum (Human Rights Data Analysis Group)
- Mahmood Sharif (Carnegie Mellon University)
- Maksym Andriushchenko (EPFL)
- Matthew Jagielski (Northeastern University)
- Octavian Suciu (University of Maryland)
- Pin-Yu Chen (IBM Research AI)
- Sanghyun Hong (University of Maryland, College Park)
- Seda Guerses (KU Leuven)
- Shruti Tople (Microsoft Research)
- Shuang Song (Google)
- Sven Gowal (DeepMind)
- Varun Chandrasekaran (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- Yair Zick (National University of Singapore)
- Yang Zhang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)
- Yizheng Chen (Columbia University)