论文标题
可以查询偏见泄漏保护属性吗?以平稳的灵敏度实现隐私
Can Querying for Bias Leak Protected Attributes? Achieving Privacy With Smooth Sensitivity
论文作者
论文摘要
现有法规禁止模型开发人员访问受保护的属性(性别,种族等),通常会导致对人口的公平评估,而无需知道其受保护的群体。在这种情况下,机构通常会在模型开发人员(无法访问受保护属性的训练模型)与合规性团队(他们可以访问整个数据集以进行审计目的)之间采用分离。但是,模型开发人员可以通过向合规团队查询团体公平指标来测试其偏见模型。在本文中,我们首先证明,简单地查询公平指标,例如统计奇偶校验和均衡的赔率可以泄露个人对模型开发人员的受保护属性。我们证明,始终存在模型开发人员可以通过单个查询来识别测试数据集中目标个体的受保护属性的策略。特别是,我们表明,当NK << n使用压缩传感器中的技术(NK:NK的大小,NK:最小组的大小)时,可以重建所有个体的受保护属性。我们的结果在算法公平性上提出了一个有趣的辩论:是否应将查询公平指标的查询视为中立价值的解决方案,以确保遵守法规?或者,如果回答的查询数量足以确定特定个人的受保护属性,它是否构成了违反法规和隐私的行为?为了解决这种假定的违规行为,我们还提出了属性 - conceal,这是一种新颖的技术,可以通过将噪声校准为偏见查询的平滑灵敏度来实现差异隐私,从而超过了诸如拉普拉斯机制之类的天真技术。我们还包括成人数据集和合成数据的实验结果。
Existing regulations prohibit model developers from accessing protected attributes (gender, race, etc.), often resulting in fairness assessments on populations without knowing their protected groups. In such scenarios, institutions often adopt a separation between the model developers (who train models with no access to the protected attributes) and a compliance team (who may have access to the entire dataset for auditing purposes). However, the model developers might be allowed to test their models for bias by querying the compliance team for group fairness metrics. In this paper, we first demonstrate that simply querying for fairness metrics, such as statistical parity and equalized odds can leak the protected attributes of individuals to the model developers. We demonstrate that there always exist strategies by which the model developers can identify the protected attribute of a targeted individual in the test dataset from just a single query. In particular, we show that one can reconstruct the protected attributes of all the individuals from O(Nk \log( n /Nk)) queries when Nk<<n using techniques from compressed sensing (n: size of the test dataset, Nk: size of smallest group). Our results pose an interesting debate in algorithmic fairness: should querying for fairness metrics be viewed as a neutral-valued solution to ensure compliance with regulations? Or, does it constitute a violation of regulations and privacy if the number of queries answered is enough for the model developers to identify the protected attributes of specific individuals? To address this supposed violation, we also propose Attribute-Conceal, a novel technique that achieves differential privacy by calibrating noise to the smooth sensitivity of our bias query, outperforming naive techniques such as the Laplace mechanism. We also include experimental results on the Adult dataset and synthetic data.