Towards integration of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Allana, Sonal, Dara, Rozita, Lin, Xiaodong, Xiong, Pulei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Allana, Sonal
Dara, Rozita
Lin, Xiaodong
Xiong, Pulei
author_facet Allana, Sonal
Dara, Rozita
Lin, Xiaodong
Xiong, Pulei
contents Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a crucial pathway in mitigating the risk of non-transparency in the decision-making process of black-box Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. However, despite the benefits, XAI methods are found to leak the privacy of individuals whose data is used in training or querying the models. Researchers have demonstrated privacy attacks that exploit explanations to infer sensitive personal information of individuals. Currently there is a lack of defenses against known privacy attacks targeting explanations when vulnerable XAI are used in production and machine learning as a service system. To address this gap, in this article, we explore Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) as a defense mechanism against attribute inference on explanations provided by feature-based XAI methods. We empirically evaluate 3 types of PETs, namely synthetic training data, differentially private training and noise addition, on two categories of feature-based XAI. Our evaluation determines different responses from the mitigation methods and side-effects of PETs on other system properties such as utility and performance. In the best case, PETs integration in explanations reduced the risk of the attack by 49.47%, while maintaining model utility and explanation quality. Through our evaluation, we identify strategies for using PETs in XAI for maximizing benefits and minimizing the success of this privacy attack on sensitive personal information.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04528
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards integration of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Explainable Artificial Intelligence
Allana, Sonal
Dara, Rozita
Lin, Xiaodong
Xiong, Pulei
Artificial Intelligence
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a crucial pathway in mitigating the risk of non-transparency in the decision-making process of black-box Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. However, despite the benefits, XAI methods are found to leak the privacy of individuals whose data is used in training or querying the models. Researchers have demonstrated privacy attacks that exploit explanations to infer sensitive personal information of individuals. Currently there is a lack of defenses against known privacy attacks targeting explanations when vulnerable XAI are used in production and machine learning as a service system. To address this gap, in this article, we explore Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) as a defense mechanism against attribute inference on explanations provided by feature-based XAI methods. We empirically evaluate 3 types of PETs, namely synthetic training data, differentially private training and noise addition, on two categories of feature-based XAI. Our evaluation determines different responses from the mitigation methods and side-effects of PETs on other system properties such as utility and performance. In the best case, PETs integration in explanations reduced the risk of the attack by 49.47%, while maintaining model utility and explanation quality. Through our evaluation, we identify strategies for using PETs in XAI for maximizing benefits and minimizing the success of this privacy attack on sensitive personal information.
title Towards integration of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Explainable Artificial Intelligence
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04528