Mingxue Xu

Mingxue Xu, Xiang-Yang Li

It is a growing direction to utilize unintended memorization in ML models to benefit real-world applications, with recent efforts like user auditing, dataset ownership inference and forgotten data measurement. Standing on the point of ML model development, we introduce a process named data origin inference, to assist ML developers in locating missed or faulty data origin in training set without maintaining strenuous metadata. We formally define the data origin and the data origin inference task in the development of the ML model (mainly neural networks). Then we propose a novel inference strategy combining embedded-space multiple instance classification and shadow training. Diverse use cases cover language, visual and structured data, with various kinds of data origin (e.g. business, county, movie, mobile user, text author). A comprehensive performance analysis of our proposed strategy contains referenced target model layers, available testing data for each origin, and in shadow training, the implementations of feature extraction as well as shadow models. Our best inference accuracy achieves 98.96% in the language use case when the target model is a transformer-based deep neural network. Furthermore, we give a statistical analysis of different kinds of data origin to investigate what kind of origin is probably to be inferred correctly.

Mingxue Xu, Tongtong Xu, Po-Yu Chen

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) is a popular cloud-based solution for customers who aim to use an ML model but lack training data, computation resources, or expertise in ML. In this case, the training datasets are typically a private possession of the ML or data companies and are inaccessible to the customers, but the customers still need an approach to confirm that the training datasets meet their expectations and fulfil regulatory measures like fairness. However, no existing work addresses the above customers' concerns. This work is the first attempt to solve this problem, taking data origin as an entry point. We first define origin membership measurement and based on this, we then define diversity and fairness metrics to address customers' concerns. We then propose a strategy to estimate the values of these two metrics in the inaccessible training dataset, combining shadow training techniques from membership inference and an efficient featurization scheme in multiple instance learning. The evaluation contains an application of text review polarity classification applications based on the language BERT model. Experimental results show that our solution can achieve up to 0.87 accuracy for membership inspection and up to 99.3% confidence in inspecting diversity and fairness distribution.