Trustworthy Machine Learning

Trustworthy Machine Learning

Organization

Lecturers: Adam Dziedzic and Franziska Boenisch

Tutors: Nima DindarSafa and Maitri Vignesh Shah

Time: Wednesdays from 16:00 to 18:00.

Location: CISPA Building C0 (Stuhlsatzenhaus 5 66123 Saarbrücken) Lecture Hall Ground Floor (Room 0.05)

Credits: This course is enlisted with 9ETCS.

Starting Date:  April 7th

Description: The deployment of machine learning applications in real-world systems necessitates methods to ensure their trustworthiness. This course explores the different aspects of trustworthy machine learning, including Privacy, Collaborative Learning, Model Confidentiality, Robustness, Fairness and Bias, Explainability, Security, and Governance.

Learning Objectives: The objective of this tutorial is to provide attendees with a comprehensive understanding of trustworthy machine learning, covering key aspects such as privacy, robustness, fairness, explainability, security, and governance. Participants will benefit by gaining practical skills in identifying and mitigating risks associated with machine learning models, including privacy attacks, model theft, bias, and adversarial threats. By the end of the course, attendees are expected to have enhanced their knowledge of cutting-edge defense strategies, developed practical skills in securing machine learning systems, and deepened their understanding of the ethical and societal implications of deploying these models in real-world scenarios.

What you have to do weekly?

This is a flipped classroom lecture. What does this mean?

You have to watch the lecture videos a week before the lecture. Then you can ask your questions in the respective thread in the Forum on CMS. Questions regarding the course content will not be individually answered by the instructors in the forum. They will be answered in the in-person lecture hours. The in-person lecture hours are not recorded. Hence, if you have questions, you need to post them on time, and attend the Q&A session. 

Asking questions is not mandatory, but you can gain up to 1 bonus point for every *good* question that you post in the forum per session. To claim your bonus point, you then need to be in class in person. In total, you can make 10 bonus points over the semester that account for 10% bonus added to your final points of the course.

Additionally, we will post ungraded theoretical questions regarding the individual lectures before the tutorial sections. They give you an impression on how the exam and midterm will look like. We highly suggest solving them. Solutions can also be discussed in the in-person Q&A session.

What are our topics?

Privacy: We will analyze the landscape of privacy attacks against machine learning models and study the means to prevent these attacks.

Model Confidentiality: We will see that machine learning models can be easily stolen through different methods, such as simple copies of the models, or the private training data, or the extraction of the model exposed via a public or private API. We will analyze different attack strategies to steal the models and the state-of-the-art defense methods.

Robustness: We will learn about different facets of robustness, such as robustness to out-of-distribution samples, natural noise present in the input data, or adversarial examples, where attackers incur imperceptible changes to the input to ML models to fool their predictions.

Data Provenance: In the era of generative ML where data is generated and ingested by models, it becomes increasingly important to understand where data comes from, and how it shapes the models. We will address topics of training data identification and watermarking.

Collaborative Learning: We will analyze the risks to trustworthy machine learning that arise in collaborative machine learning setups and look into their mitigations.

Fairness and Bias: We will scrutinize the behavior of ML models on different subgroups of the training data. We will assess the models’ responses to inputs with different attributes and will uncover the potential causes of unfair or biased model responses and current mitigations.

Explainability: We will address the challenges that arise from machine learning models’ black-box behavior and look into techniques to explain predictive behavior.

Throughout the course, we will discuss outstanding challenges and future research directions to make machine learning more robust, private, and trustworthy.

Assignments (with tentative dates):

The course entails 4 practical graded assignments based on implementing the concepts studied during the lecture.

Assignments need to be handed in groups of two. If you do not have a partner, yet, you can use the forum to find one.

1. Privacy: Implement a membership inference attack and achieve the highest attack success. We give a model and a list of data points, your task is to determine for each point yes/no, meaning: member/no-member. --> Due 6.5.

2. Model extraction: We will offer a machine-learning model over an API and you will extract the model behavior. You upload a PyTorch model. We check how close the uploaded model is in terms of the predictions to the victim model. --> Due 27.5.

3. Robustness: Train a model as robust as possible against the highest number of adversarial examples we will generate. You submit a PyTorch model, we load it, and run the attack. The goal is to create a model with the highest adversarial and clean accuracy. --> Due 17.6.

4. Fairness: Train a classifier that has the highest demographic parity. You submit a PyTorch model and we assess how fair it is. --> Due 8.7.

Submission of Assignments:

Please submit the assignments over CMS in a ZIP file. We only need the code and README+Report. Models and other artifacts should not be uploaded. Submissions that are not uploaded by the submission time over CMS will not be considered. If you upload larger folders, you need to start a few minutes before the submission deadline as the upload may take some time. You can also upload an initial submission and then overwrite it. But we will not take "CMS upload took to long/failed" as an excuse for assignments that are not received. They will be graded with 0 points.

Exam and Grading

Exam format: written.

Tentative Lecture Dates

The videos for each lecture are linked at the respective lecture date. To access the full playlist, visit: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNfU-a7sxIwvS7dhnOPdFtvhdNcrnufEW 

1. Overview on the Course, Administration, Intro, and Questions about Privacy I (8.4., Franziska and Adam)

2. Questions on Privacy II (15.4., Franziska and Adam)

3. Tutorial on Assignment 1, Coding in Python, Submitting your Solutions to our API (22.4., Nima and Maitri)

4. Tutorial on Theoretical Exercises for the Topic Block Privacy (29.4., Nima and Maitri)

5. Questions on Model stealing and defenses, both SL and SSL  (6.05., Franziska and Adam)

6. Tutorial on Assignment 2 (13.5., Nima and Maitri)

7. Tutorial on Theoretical Exercises for the Topic Block Model Stealing (20.5., Nima and Maitri)

8. Midterm-Exam on 3.6. (3rd of June) 4PM-5:00PM.  We'll first be writing the exam, and then have a second part.

9. Adversarial Machine Learning / Robustness (10.6.)

10. Collaborative learning (17.6.a, 17.6.b)

11. Fairness and bias (24.6.)

12. Explainability (1.7. HS I in E 2.5!!!!! ATTENTION, DIFFERENT LOCATION THAN USUAL CHANGE) 

13. Security and Governance (8.7.)

14. Summary & Open Questions (8.7.)

15. Final Exam on 29.7. (29th of July) from 16.00 - 18.00. Location: HS I in E 2.5

Do I have the right qualifications for the lecture?

Students are required to have successfully completed a basic lecture on machine learning.

Additionally, you need to have hands-on coding experience with Python for Machine Learning. This means, preferably PyTorch (alternatively TensorFlow). All assignments will require you to do this type of coding. If you are unfamiliar and have never coded in PyTorch, it will be a steep learning curve.