Rebecca Bilbro

ByteCubed

Inferring Model Families from Deployed Black Boxes (pdf, video)

While data privacy challenges long predate current trends in machine-learning-as-a-service (MLAAS) offerings, predictive APIs do expose significant new attack vectors. To provide users with tailored recommendations, these applications often expose endpoints either to dynamic models or to pre-trained model artifacts, which learn patterns from data to surface insights. Problems arise when training data are collected, stored, and modeled in ways that jeopardize privacy. Even when user data is not exposed directly, private information can often be inferred using a technique called model inversion. In this talk, I discuss current research in black box model inversion and present a machine learning approach to discovering the model families of deployed black box models using only their decision topologies.