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Over the past two decades, the rise in adoption of neural networks has surged in parallel with their performance. Concurrently, we have observed the inherent fragility of these prediction models: small changes to the inputs can induce classification errors across entire datasets. In the following study, we examine perturbations constrained by the $\ell _{0}$ –norm, a potent attack model in the domains of computer vision, malware detection, and natural language processing.

Detection of sparse signals arises in many modern applications such as signal processing, bioinformatics, finance, and disease surveillance. However, in many of these applications, the data may contain sensitive personal information, which is desirable to be protected during the data analysis. In this article, we consider the problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$ -differentially private detection of a general sparse mixture with a focus on how privacy affects the detection power.

We study the community detection problem over binary symmetric stochastic block models (SBMs) while preserving the privacy of the individual connections between the vertices.

We investigate the contraction properties of locally differentially private mechanisms. More specifically, we derive tight upper bounds on the divergence between $P{\mathsf K}$ and $Q{\mathsf K}$ output distributions of an $\varepsilon $ -LDP mechanism $\mathsf K$ in terms of a divergence between the corresponding input distributions P and Q, respectively. Our first main technical result presents a sharp upper bound on the $\chi ^{2}$ -divergence $\chi ^{2}(P{\mathsf K}\|Q{\mathsf K})$ in terms of $\chi ^{2}(P\|Q)$ and $\varepsilon $ .

Machine learning (ML) models used in prediction and classification tasks may display performance disparities across population groups determined by sensitive attributes (e.g., race, sex, age). We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a fixed ML model across population groups defined by multiple sensitive attributes (e.g., race and sex and age).

There is an emerging interest in generating robust algorithmic recourse that would remain valid if the model is updated or changed even slightly. Towards finding robust algorithmic recourse (or counterfactual explanations), existing literature often assumes that the original model m and the new model M are bounded in the parameter space, i.e., $\|\text {Params}(M){-}\text {Params}(m)\|{\lt }\Delta $ . However, models can often change significantly in the parameter space with little to no change in their predictions or accuracy on the given dataset.

We consider the straggler problem in decentralized learning over a logical ring while preserving user data privacy. Especially, we extend the recently proposed framework of differential privacy (DP) amplification by decentralization by Cyffers and Bellet to include overall training latency—comprising both computation and communication latency.

We study a setting where a data holder wishes to share data with a receiver, without revealing certain summary statistics of the data distribution (e.g., mean, standard deviation). It achieves this by passing the data through a randomization mechanism. We propose summary statistic privacy, a metric for quantifying the privacy risk of such a mechanism based on the worst-case probability of an adversary guessing the distributional secret within some threshold.

In the popular federated learning scenarios, distributed nodes often represent and exchange information through functions or statistics of data, with communicative processes constrained by the dimensionality of transmitted information. This paper investigates the fundamental limits of distributed parameter estimation and model training problems under such constraints. Specifically, we assume that each node can observe a sequence of i.i.d. sampled data and communicate statistics of the observed data with dimensionality constraints.

This paper brings together topics of two of Berger’s main contributions to information theory: distributed source coding, and living information theory. Our goal is to understand which information theory techniques can be helpful in understanding a distributed source coding strategy used by the natural world. Towards this goal, we study the example of the encoding of location of an animal by grid cells in its brain.