Under manipulations, are some AI models harder to audit?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Godinot, Augustin, Tredan, Gilles, Merrer, Erwan Le, Penzo, Camilla, Taïani, Francois
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Godinot, Augustin
Tredan, Gilles
Merrer, Erwan Le
Penzo, Camilla
Taïani, Francois
author_facet Godinot, Augustin
Tredan, Gilles
Merrer, Erwan Le
Penzo, Camilla
Taïani, Francois
contents Auditors need robust methods to assess the compliance of web platforms with the law. However, since they hardly ever have access to the algorithm, implementation, or training data used by a platform, the problem is harder than a simple metric estimation. Within the recent framework of manipulation-proof auditing, we study in this paper the feasibility of robust audits in realistic settings, in which models exhibit large capacities. We first prove a constraining result: if a web platform uses models that may fit any data, no audit strategy -- whether active or not -- can outperform random sampling when estimating properties such as demographic parity. To better understand the conditions under which state-of-the-art auditing techniques may remain competitive, we then relate the manipulability of audits to the capacity of the targeted models, using the Rademacher complexity. We empirically validate these results on popular models of increasing capacities, thus confirming experimentally that large-capacity models, which are commonly used in practice, are particularly hard to audit robustly. These results refine the limits of the auditing problem, and open up enticing questions on the connection between model capacity and the ability of platforms to manipulate audit attempts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_09043
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Under manipulations, are some AI models harder to audit?
Godinot, Augustin
Tredan, Gilles
Merrer, Erwan Le
Penzo, Camilla
Taïani, Francois
Machine Learning
Auditors need robust methods to assess the compliance of web platforms with the law. However, since they hardly ever have access to the algorithm, implementation, or training data used by a platform, the problem is harder than a simple metric estimation. Within the recent framework of manipulation-proof auditing, we study in this paper the feasibility of robust audits in realistic settings, in which models exhibit large capacities. We first prove a constraining result: if a web platform uses models that may fit any data, no audit strategy -- whether active or not -- can outperform random sampling when estimating properties such as demographic parity. To better understand the conditions under which state-of-the-art auditing techniques may remain competitive, we then relate the manipulability of audits to the capacity of the targeted models, using the Rademacher complexity. We empirically validate these results on popular models of increasing capacities, thus confirming experimentally that large-capacity models, which are commonly used in practice, are particularly hard to audit robustly. These results refine the limits of the auditing problem, and open up enticing questions on the connection between model capacity and the ability of platforms to manipulate audit attempts.
title Under manipulations, are some AI models harder to audit?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09043