If you are like me, entering into the field of deep learning with experience in traditional machine learning, you may often ponder over this question: Since a typical deep neural network has so many parameters and training error can easily be perfect, it should surely suffer from substantial overfitting. How could it be ever generalized to out-of-sample data points? Read More
Monthly Archives: March 2019
Welcome To The Machine Learning Biases That Still Exist In 2019
With machine learning, the world relies on technology for recommendations recognition systems. But a lot of these systems are corrupted because they have a certain bias associated with them and are hence not accurate with their functioning. Human Biases That Can Result Into ML Biases include: Reporting Bias/Sample Bias, Prejudice Bias, Measurement Bias, Automation Bias, Group Attribution Bias, and Algorithm Bias, among others. What Can Be Done To Prevent Biases? Read More
Efficient Decentralized Deep Learning by Dynamic Model Averaging
We propose an efficient protocol for decentralized training of deep neural networks from distributed data sources. The proposed protocol allows to handle different phases of model training equally well and to quickly adapt to concept drifts. This leads to a reduction of communication by an order of magnitude compared to periodically communicating state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we derive a communication bound that scales well with the hardness of the serialized learning problem. The reduction in communication comes at almost no cost, as the predictive performance remains virtually unchanged. Indeed, the proposed protocol retains loss bounds of periodically averaging schemes. An extensive empirical evaluation validates major improvement of the trade-off between model performance and communication which could be beneficial for numerous decentralized learning applications, such as autonomous driving, or voice recognition and image classification on mobile phones. Read More
Ian Goodfellow- Machine Learning Privacy and Security
Multi-Party Computation: From Theory to Practice
Chameleon: A Hybrid Secure Computation Framework for Machine Learning Applications
We present Chameleon, a novel hybrid (mixed-protocol) framework for secure function evaluation (SFE) which enables two parties to jointly compute a function without disclosing their private inputs. Chameleon combines the best aspects of generic SFE protocols with the ones that are based upon additive secret sharing. In particular, the framework performs linear operations in the ring Z2 l using additively secret shared values and nonlinear operations using Yao’s Garbled Circuits or the Goldreich-Micali-Wigderson protocol. Chameleon departs from the common assumption of additive or linear secret sharing models where three or more parties need to communicate in the online phase: the framework allows two parties with private inputs to communicate in the online phase under the assumption of a third node generating correlated randomness in an offline phase. Almost all of the heavy cryptographic operations are precomputed in an offline phase which substantially reduces the communication overhead. Chameleon is both scalable and significantly more efficient than the ABY framework (NDSS’15) it is based on. Our framework supports signed fixed-point numbers. In particular, Chameleon’s vector dot product of signed fixed-point numbers improves the efficiency of mining and classification of encrypted data for algorithms based upon heavy matrix multiplications. Our evaluation of Chameleon on a 5 layer convolutional deep neural network shows 133x and 4.2x faster executions than Microsoft CryptoNets (ICML’16) and MiniONN (CCS’17), respectively. Read More
Private Collaborative Neural Network Learning
Machine learning algorithms, such as neural networks, create better predictive models when having access to larger datasets. In many domains, such as medicine and finance, each institute has only access to limited amounts of data, and creating larger datasets typically requires collaboration. However, there are privacy related constraints on these collaborations for legal, ethical, and competitive reasons. In this work, we present a feasible protocol for learning neural networks in a collaborative way while preserving the privacy of each record. This is achieved by combining Differential Privacy and Secure Multi-Party Computation with Machine Learning. Read More
Tutorial on Secure Multi-Part Computation
Good briefing as backgrounder —- Read More
From Keys to Databases – Real-World Applications of Secure Multi-Party Computation
We discuss the widely increasing range of applications of a cryptographic technique called Multi-Party Computation. For many decades this was perceived to be of purely theoretical interest, but now it has started to find application in a number of use cases. We highlight in this paper a number of these, ranging from securing small high value items such as cryptographic keys, through to securing an entire database. Read More
Secure Multiparty Computation
Introduction — High level briefing of concepts, challenges, and real-world uses. Read More