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Shattering the Illusion of Unexploitable Data Using Diffusion Models (arxiv.org)
4 points by belter on Mar 19, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Some people add invisible noise to their photos so AI models can't learn from them. A diffusion model's denoising step wipes out that noise, beating adversarial training and restoring the data's usefulness for training.

Abstract · The Devil's Advocate: Shattering the Illusion of Unexploitable Data using Diffusion Models

Protecting personal data against exploitation of machine learning models is crucial. Recently, availability attacks have shown great promise to provide an extra layer of protection against the unauthorized use of data to train neural networks. These methods aim to add imperceptible noise to clean data so that the neural networks cannot extract meaningful patterns from the protected data, claiming that they can make personal data "unexploitable." This paper provides a strong countermeasure against such approaches, showing that unexploitable data might only be an illusion. In particular, we leverage the power of diffusion models and show that a carefully designed denoising process can counteract the effectiveness of the data-protecting perturbations. We rigorously analyze our algorithm, and theoretically prove that the amount of required denoising is directly related to the magnitude of the data-protecting perturbations. Our approach, called AVATAR, delivers state-of-the-art performance against a suite of recent availability attacks in various scenarios, outperforming adversarial training even under distribution mismatch between the diffusion model and the protected data. Our findings call for more research into making personal data unexploitable, showing that this goal is far from over. Our implementation is available at this repository: https://github.com/hmdolatabadi/AVATAR.

Hadi M. Dolatabadi, Sarah Erfani, Christopher Leckie
arXiv:2303.08500 · cs.LG, cs.CR, cs.CV · submitted Mar 15, 2023 · updated Jan 11, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to the 2024 IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SatML)

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