Distributed generation of privacy preserving data with user customization
This addresses privacy concerns for users of distributed devices like mobile phones in machine learning applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing VAE and GAN methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating privacy-preserving data from distributed devices while maintaining data utility, by decoupling latent representation creation and privatization, and demonstrates effectiveness on MNIST, UCI-Adult, and CelebA datasets with empirical mutual information evaluations.
Distributed devices such as mobile phones can produce and store large amounts of data that can enhance machine learning models; however, this data may contain private information specific to the data owner that prevents the release of the data. We wish to reduce the correlation between user-specific private information and data while maintaining the useful information. Rather than learning a large model to achieve privatization from end to end, we introduce a decoupling of the creation of a latent representation and the privatization of data that allows user-specific privatization to occur in a distributed setting with limited computation and minimal disturbance on the utility of the data. We leverage a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to create a compact latent representation of the data; however, the VAE remains fixed for all devices and all possible private labels. We then train a small generative filter to perturb the latent representation based on individual preferences regarding the private and utility information. The small filter is trained by utilizing a GAN-type robust optimization that can take place on a distributed device. We conduct experiments on three popular datasets: MNIST, UCI-Adult, and CelebA, and give a thorough evaluation including visualizing the geometry of the latent embeddings and estimating the empirical mutual information to show the effectiveness of our approach.