Privacy-Preserving UCB Decision Process Verification via zk-SNARKs
This addresses privacy concerns in reinforcement learning for applications sensitive to data confidentiality, though it is an incremental improvement combining existing cryptographic techniques with a standard algorithm.
This paper tackles the challenge of balancing data privacy with verifiability in reinforcement learning by introducing zkUCB, a privacy-preserving version of the UCB algorithm for Multi-Armed Bandit problems using zk-SNARKs, which shows enhanced reward through optimized quantization bits and scales proof size and verification time linearly with execution steps.
With the increasingly widespread application of machine learning, how to strike a balance between protecting the privacy of data and algorithm parameters and ensuring the verifiability of machine learning has always been a challenge. This study explores the intersection of reinforcement learning and data privacy, specifically addressing the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm. We introduce zkUCB, an innovative algorithm that employs the Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) to enhance UCB. zkUCB is carefully designed to safeguard the confidentiality of training data and algorithmic parameters, ensuring transparent UCB decision-making. Experiments highlight zkUCB's superior performance, attributing its enhanced reward to judicious quantization bit usage that reduces information entropy in the decision-making process. zkUCB's proof size and verification time scale linearly with the execution steps of zkUCB. This showcases zkUCB's adept balance between data security and operational efficiency. This approach contributes significantly to the ongoing discourse on reinforcing data privacy in complex decision-making processes, offering a promising solution for privacy-sensitive applications.