Siddharth Garg

This research was led by Siddharth Garg, Institute Associate Professor of electrical and computer engineering, and included Benjamin Tan, a research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Kang Liu, a Ph.D. student.  

Machine learning (ML) systems are being proposed for use in domains that can affect our day-to-day lives, including face expression recognition systems. Because of the need for privacy, users will look to use privacy preservation tools, typical produced by a third party. To this end, generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) have been proposed for generating or manipulating images. Versions of these systems called “privacy-preserving GANs” (PP-GANs) are designed to sanitize sensitive data (e.g., images of human faces) so that only application-critical information is retained while private attributes, such as the identity of a subject, are removed —  by, for example, preserving facial expressions while replacing other identifying information.

Such ML-based privacy tools have potential applications in other privacy sensitive domains such as to remove location-relevant information from vehicular camera data; obfuscate the identity of a person who produced a handwriting sample; or remove barcodes from images. In the case of GANs, the complexity involved in training such models suggests the outsourcing of GAN training in order to achieve PP-GANs functionality.

To measure the privacy-preserving performance of PP-GANs researchers typically use empirical metrics of information leakage to demonstrate the (in)ability of deep learning (DL)-based discriminators to identify secret information from sanitized images. Noting that empirical metrics are dependent on discriminators’ learning capacities and training budgets, Garg and his collaborators argue that such privacy checks lack the necessary rigor for guaranteeing privacy.

In the paper “Subverting Privacy-Preserving GANs: Hiding Secrets in Sanitized Images,” the team formulated an adversarial setting to "stress-test" whether empirical privacy checks are sufficient to guarantee protection against private data recovery from data that has been “sanitized” by a PP-GAN. In doing so, they showed that PP-GAN designs can, in fact, be subverted to pass privacy checks, while still allowing secret information to be extracted from sanitized images.

While the team’s adversarial PP-GAN passed all existing privacy checks, it actually hid secret data pertaining to the sensitive attributes, even allowing for reconstruction of the original private image. They showed that the results have both foundational and practical implications, and that stronger privacy checks are needed before PP-GANs can be deployed in the real-world.

“From a practical stand-point, our results sound a note of caution against the use of data sanitization tools, and specifically PP-GANs, designed by third-parties,” explained Garg.

The study, which will be presented at the virtual 35^thAAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, provides background on PP-GANs and associated empirical privacy checks; formulates an attack scenario to ask if empirical privacy checks can be subverted, and outlines an approach for circumventing empirical privacy checks.

• The team provides the first comprehensive security analysis of privacy-preserving GANs and demonstrate that existing privacy checks are inadequate to detect leakage of sensitive information. 

• Using a novel steganographic approach, they adversarially modify a state-of-the-art PP-GAN to hide a secret (the user ID), from purportedly sanitized face images. 

• They show that their proposed adversarial PP-GAN can successfully hide sensitive attributes in “sanitized” output images that pass privacy checks, with 100% secret recovery rate. 


“Our experimental results highlighted the insufficiency of existing DL-based privacy checks, and potential risks of using untrusted third-party PP-GAN tools,” said Garg, in the study.

The National Science Foundation grant for this research was obtained by Siddharth Garg and Elza Erkip, professors of electrical and computer engineering, and Yao Wang, professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical engineering. Wang and Erkip are also members of the NYU WIRELESS research center.

Increasing amounts of data are being collected on mobile and internet-of-things (IoT) devices. Users are interested in analyzing this data to extract actionable information for such purposes as identifying objects of interest from high-resolution mobile phone pictures. The state-of-the-art technique for such data analysis employs deep learning, which makes use of sophisticated software algorithms modeled on the functioning of the human brain. Deep learning algorithms are, however, too complex to run on small, battery constrained mobile devices. The alternative, i.e., transmitting data to the mobile base station where the deep learning algorithm can be executed on a powerful server, consumes too much bandwidth.

This project that this NSF funding will support seeks to devise new methods to compress data before transmission, thus reducing bandwidth costs while still allowing for the data to be analyzed at the base station. Departing from existing data compression methods optimized for reproducing the original images, the team will develop a means of using deep learning itself to compress the data in a fashion that only keeps the critical parts of data necessary for subsequent analysis. The resulting deep learning based compression algorithms will be simple enough to run on mobile devices while drastically reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted to mobile base stations for analysis, without significantly compromising the analysis performance.

The proposed research will provide greater capability and functionality to mobile device users, enable extended battery lifetimes and more efficient sharing of the wireless spectrum for analytics tasks. The project also envisions a multi-pronged effort aimed at outreach to communities of interest, educating and training the next generation of machine learning and wireless professionals at the K-12, undergraduate and graduate levels, and broadening participation of under-represented minority groups.

The project seeks to learn "analytics-aware" compression schemes from data, by training low-complexity deep neural networks (DNNs) for data compression that execute on mobile devices and achieve a range of transmission rate and analytics accuracy targets. As a first step, efficient DNN pruning techniques will be developed to minimize the DNN complexity, while maintaining the rate-accuracy efficiency for one or a collection of analytics tasks.

Next, to efficiently adapt to varying wireless channel conditions, the project will seek to design adaptive DNN architectures that can operate at variable transmission rates and computational complexities. For instance, when the wireless channel quality drops, the proposed compression scheme will be able to quickly reduce transmission rate in response while ensuring the same analytics accuracy, but at the cost of greater computational power on the mobile device.

Further, wireless channel allocation and scheduling policies that leverage the proposed adaptive DNN architectures will be developed to optimize the overall analytics accuracy at the server. The benefits of the proposed approach in terms of total battery life savings for the mobile device will be demonstrated using detailed simulation studies of various wireless protocols including those used for LTE (Long Term Evolution) and mmWave channels.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.