March 23, 2020

WARNING!! Neural networks can memorize secrets (ep. 100)

24 minutes

One of the best features of neural networks and machine learning models is to memorize patterns from training data and apply those to unseen observations. That's where the magic is.

However, there are scenarios in which the same machine learning models learn patterns so well such that they can disclose some of the data they have been trained on. This phenomenon goes under the name of unintended memorization and it is extremely dangerous.

Think about a language generator that discloses the passwords, the credit card numbers and the social security numbers of the records it has been trained on. Or more generally, think about a synthetic data generator that can disclose the training data it is trying to protect.

In this episode I explain why unintended memorization is a real problem in machine learning. Except for differentially private training there is no other way to mitigate such a problem in realistic conditions.

At Pryml we are very aware of this. Which is why we have been developing a synthetic data generation technology that is not affected by such an issue.

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References

The Secret Sharer: Evaluating and Testing Unintended Memorization in Neural Networks

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/carlini

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By Francesco Gadaleta

4.2

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