Speakers: Animesh Singh and Svetlana Levitan (IBM). They work at the “center for open source data and AI technologies” @ IBM.

Bias throughout the AI lifecycle

There’s an open source toolkit AIF360 (“AI Fairness 360”) to monitor and remove bias in machine learning models. It includes 70+ fairness metrics and 10 mitigation algorithms to help remove those. One of those metrics is disparate impact (!!!) along with tons of others, and this actually seems incredible.

Adversarial attacks

This field is getting a lot noisier (heh) and more research; adding white noise that is imperceptible to humans can blow up models and make their predictions vary wildly. Famous examples include the adversarial patch that makes everything appear to be a toaster; scarier ones include adding adversarial noise to self-driving cars.

Poisoning attacks are performed at training, by inserting poisoned samples in training data. This lets a malicious agent use a backdoor later. Evasion attacks are performed at test time.

Threat models include:

  • black box vs. white box; what knowledge does the attacker have about the model? how do they access the model?
  • plausible deniability: how important is it for the attacker to use adversarial samples that resemble original inputs?
  • type I vs. II errors: bypass safeguards or increase false alarms?
  • one more that I missed

Some evasion attacks push neural networks (or other models) out of their desired operating range — either finding a region of space that’s sparse or pushing it out of the range that it was trained on. Key point is that DNNs don’t learn to recognize a schoolbus, but rather to discriminate it from other objects in the training set.

Defending adversarial attacks

Training solely on adversarial examples, which increases the capacity to maintain accuracy on clean data. Use a specific algorithm to intentionally introduce poisoned data as the model is trained.

Preprocess data to remove adversarial noise, and input the cleaned samples into the classifier. But this can be defeated by an adaptive adversary (someone who knows how the cleaning is done).

Robustness metrics, e.g., CLEVER, which evaluate how robust neural networks are. Paper: “Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks: An Extreme Value Theory.”

Poisoning detection, where you look at clustering of the training data and see if it’s been poisoned.

Many, many others …

All of this to say that IBM built the Adversarial Robustness Toolbox, which is open-source and is a library for adversarial machine learning. It includes evasion attacks, evasion defenses, poisioning and evasion detection, and robustness metrics.

Demos

These were all super slick. This demo lets you interactively add imperceptible noise to images, and wow this is so cool. Then they showed some Jupyter notebooks with code samples from their toolbox.

Another paper: Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks.