The Fundamental Limits of Least-Privilege Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Stadler, Theresa, Kulynych, Bogdan, Gastpar, Michael C., Papernot, Nicolas, Troncoso, Carmela
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Stadler, Theresa
Kulynych, Bogdan
Gastpar, Michael C.
Papernot, Nicolas
Troncoso, Carmela
author_facet Stadler, Theresa
Kulynych, Bogdan
Gastpar, Michael C.
Papernot, Nicolas
Troncoso, Carmela
contents The promise of least-privilege learning -- to find feature representations that are useful for a learning task but prevent inference of any sensitive information unrelated to this task -- is highly appealing. However, so far this concept has only been stated informally. It thus remains an open question whether and how we can achieve this goal. In this work, we provide the first formalisation of the least-privilege principle for machine learning and characterise its feasibility. We prove that there is a fundamental trade-off between a representation's utility for a given task and its leakage beyond the intended task: it is not possible to learn representations that have high utility for the intended task but, at the same time prevent inference of any attribute other than the task label itself. This trade-off holds under realistic assumptions on the data distribution and regardless of the technique used to learn the feature mappings that produce these representations. We empirically validate this result for a wide range of learning techniques, model architectures, and datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_12235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Fundamental Limits of Least-Privilege Learning
Stadler, Theresa
Kulynych, Bogdan
Gastpar, Michael C.
Papernot, Nicolas
Troncoso, Carmela
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
The promise of least-privilege learning -- to find feature representations that are useful for a learning task but prevent inference of any sensitive information unrelated to this task -- is highly appealing. However, so far this concept has only been stated informally. It thus remains an open question whether and how we can achieve this goal. In this work, we provide the first formalisation of the least-privilege principle for machine learning and characterise its feasibility. We prove that there is a fundamental trade-off between a representation's utility for a given task and its leakage beyond the intended task: it is not possible to learn representations that have high utility for the intended task but, at the same time prevent inference of any attribute other than the task label itself. This trade-off holds under realistic assumptions on the data distribution and regardless of the technique used to learn the feature mappings that produce these representations. We empirically validate this result for a wide range of learning techniques, model architectures, and datasets.
title The Fundamental Limits of Least-Privilege Learning
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12235