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Measuring Unintended Neural Network Memorization and Extracting Secrets (arxiv.org)
2 points by henning on Oct 26, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A test measures how much a text model memorizes rare data by planting secret strings and seeing if it can be coaxed to repeat them. Memorization proved hard to avoid, letting credit card numbers leak, and it limits data exposure in Google's Smart Compose.

Abstract · The Secret Sharer: Evaluating and Testing Unintended Memorization in Neural Networks

This paper describes a testing methodology for quantitatively assessing the risk that rare or unique training-data sequences are unintentionally memorized by generative sequence models---a common type of machine-learning model. Because such models are sometimes trained on sensitive data (e.g., the text of users' private messages), this methodology can benefit privacy by allowing deep-learning practitioners to select means of training that minimize such memorization. In experiments, we show that unintended memorization is a persistent, hard-to-avoid issue that can have serious consequences. Specifically, for models trained without consideration of memorization, we describe new, efficient procedures that can extract unique, secret sequences, such as credit card numbers. We show that our testing strategy is a practical and easy-to-use first line of defense, e.g., by describing its application to quantitatively limit data exposure in Google's Smart Compose, a commercial text-completion neural network trained on millions of users' email messages.

Nicholas Carlini, Chang Liu, Úlfar Erlingsson, Jernej Kos, Dawn Song
arXiv:1802.08232 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR · submitted Feb 22, 2018 · updated Jul 16, 2019
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