As Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models become ever more pervasive, it is important to ensure that they make reliable predictions under corruptions present in the physical and digital world. We propose Speech Robust Bench (SRB), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the robustness of ASR models to diverse corruptions. SRB is composed of 114 input perturbations which simulate an heterogeneous range of corruptions that ASR models may encounter when deployed in the wild. We use SRB to evaluate the robustness of several state-of-the-art ASR models and observe that model size and certain modeling choices such as the use of discrete representations, or self-training appear to be conducive to robustness. We extend this analysis to measure the robustness of ASR models on data from various demographic subgroups, namely English and Spanish speakers, and males and females. Our results revealed noticeable disparities in the model's robustness across subgroups. We believe that SRB will significantly facilitate future research towards robust ASR models, by making it easier to conduct comprehensive and comparable robustness evaluations.

Training and deploying Machine Learning models that simultaneously adhere to principles of fairness and privacy while ensuring good utility poses a significant challenge. The interplay between these three factors of trustworthiness is frequently underestimated and remains insufficiently explored. Consequently, many efforts focus on ensuring only two of these factors, neglecting one in the process. The decentralization of the datasets and the variations in distributions among the clients exacerbate the complexity of achieving this ethical trade-off in the context of Federated Learning (FL). For the first time in FL literature, we address these three factors of trustworthiness. We introduce PUFFLE, a high-level parameterised approach that can help in the exploration of the balance between utility, privacy, and fairness in FL scenarios. We prove that PUFFLE can be effective across diverse datasets, models, and data distributions, reducing the model unfairness up to 75%, with a maximum reduction in the utility of 17% in the worst-case scenario, while maintaining strict privacy guarantees during the FL training.

Recent developments in differentially private (DP) machine learning and DP Bayesian learning have enabled learning under strong privacy guarantees for the training data subjects. In this paper, we further extend the applicability of DP Bayesian learning by presenting the first general DP Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm whose privacy-guarantees are not subject to unrealistic assumptions on Markov chain convergence and that is applicable to posterior inference in arbitrary models. Our algorithm is based on a decomposition of the Barker acceptance test that allows evaluating the Rényi DP privacy cost of the accept-reject choice. We further show how to improve the DP guarantee through data subsampling and approximate acceptance tests.

MOTIVATION: Human genomic datasets often contain sensitive information that limits use and sharing of the data. In particular, simple anonymization strategies fail to provide sufficient level of protection for genomic data, because the data are inherently identifiable. Differentially private machine learning can help by guaranteeing that the published results do not leak too much information about any individual data point. Recent research has reached promising results on differentially private drug sensitivity prediction using gene expression data. Differentially private learning with genomic data is challenging because it is more difficult to guarantee privacy in high dimensions. Dimensionality reduction can help, but if the dimension reduction mapping is learned from the data, then it needs to be differentially private too, which can carry a significant privacy cost. Furthermore, the selection of any hyperparameters (such as the target dimensionality) needs to also avoid leaking private information. RESULTS: We study an approach that uses a large public dataset of similar type to learn a compact representation for differentially private learning. We compare three representation learning methods: variational autoencoders, principal component analysis and random projection. We solve two machine learning tasks on gene expression of cancer cell lines: cancer type classification, and drug sensitivity prediction. The experiments demonstrate significant benefit from all representation learning methods with variational autoencoders providing the most accurate predictions most often. Our results significantly improve over previous state-of-the-art in accuracy of differentially private drug sensitivity prediction. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Code used in the experiments is available at https://github.com/DPBayes/dp-representation-transfer.

Many applications of machine learning, for example in health care, would benefit from methods that can guarantee privacy of data subjects. Differential privacy (DP) has become established as a standard for protecting learning results. The standard DP algorithms require a single trusted party to have access to the entire data, which is a clear weakness, or add prohibitive amounts of noise. We consider DP Bayesian learning in a distributed setting, where each party only holds a single sample or a few samples of the data. We propose a learning strategy based on a secure multi-party sum function for aggregating summaries from data holders and the Gaussian mechanism for DP. Our method builds on an asymptotically optimal and practically efficient DP Bayesian inference with rapidly diminishing extra cost.