Fahim Faisal, Orevaoghene Ahia, Aarohi Srivastava, Kabir Ahuja, David Chiang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Antonios Anastasopoulos. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

In the current era of data science, deep learning, computer vision and image analysis have become ubiquitous across various sectors, ranging from government agencies and large corporations to small end devices, due to their ability to simplify people’s lives. However, the widespread use of sensitive image data and the high memorization capacity of deep learning present significant privacy risks. Now, a simple Google search can yield numerous images of a person, and the knowledge that a specific patient’s record was utilized for training a specific model associated with a disease may reveal the patient’s ailment, potentially leading to membership privacy leakage and other advanced attacks in the future. Furthermore, these unprotected models may also suffer from poor generalization due to this overfitting to train data. Previous state-of-the-art methods like differential privacy (DP) and regularizer-based defenses compromised functionality, i.e., task accuracy, to preserve privacy. Such an imbalanced trade-off raises concerns about the practicability of such defenses. Other existing knowledge-transfer-based methods either reuse private data or require more public data, which could compromise privacy and may not be viable in certain domains. To address these challenges, where membership privacy is of utmost importance and utility cannot be compromised, we propose a novel collaborative distillation approach that transfers the private model’s knowledge based on a minimal amount of distilled synthetic data, leading to a compact private model in an end-to-end fashion. Empirically, our proposed method guarantees superior performance compared to most advanced models currently in use, increasing utility by almost 8%, 34%, and 6% for CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNIST, respectively. The utility resembles non-private counterparts almost closely while maintaining a respectable level of membership privacy leakage of 50-53.5%, despite employing a smaller model with 50% fewer parameters.

Yueqi Song, Simran Khanuja, Pengfei Liu, Fahim Faisal, Alissa Ostapenko, Genta Winata, Alham Aji, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Yulia Tsvetkov, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

The regular discovery of new attacks on 802.11 wireless devices emphasizes the importance of developing ML-based intrusion detection systems that generalize to such attacks. Class-imbalance issues in intrusion datasets pose a learning problem for ML solutions. Our methodology directly incorporates the class-imbalance issues to learn better feature importance measures. With features extracted using this technique from the AWID dataset, we use a gradient-boosted model to show that these features are necessary to generalize to new attack types in the AWID test dataset.

As language technologies become more ubiquitous, there are increasing efforts towards expanding the language diversity and coverage of natural language processing (NLP) systems.Arguably, the most important factor influencing the quality of modern NLP systems is data availability.In this work, we study the geographical representativeness of NLP datasets, aiming to quantify if and by how much do NLP datasets match the expected needs of the language speakers.In doing so, we use entity recognition and linking systems, presenting an approach for good-enough entity linking without entity recognition first.Last, we explore some geographical and economic factors that may explain the observed dataset distributions. 1

Due to the recent development in the deep learning community and the availability of state-of-the-art models, medical practitioners are getting more interested in computer vision and deep learning for diagnosis tasks. Moreover, those medical diagnostic models can also increase the reliability of conventional findings. As radiology images can convey a lot of information for a patient’s diagnosis task, the problem is that such medical data may contain sensitive private information in their content header. De-anonymization (i.e., removal of sensitive header information) does not work well due to the re-identification risk, which may link those images to essential details (e.g., birth date, SSN, institution name, etc.), and such an approach can also reduce utility. In the medical domain, utility is significant because a less accurate diagnosis may lead to the wrong course of treatment and/or loss of life. In this paper, we developed a differentially private approach that can generate high-quality and high dimensional synthetic medical image data with guaranteed differential privacy. It can be used to create sufficient quality data to train a deep model. Moreover, we used W-GAN for bounded gradient guarantee, which eliminates the need for an extensive clipping hyperparameter search. We also added noise selectively to the generator to maintain the privacy-utility trade-off. Due to a noise-free discriminator and such selective noise addition to the generator, high-quality and reliable generated radiology images can be utilized for diagnosis tasks. Moreover, our approach can work in a distributed system where different hospitals can contain their private images in the local server and use a central server to generate synthetic radiology images without storing patient data.