ICLR 2024 Papers

Gradient inversion attacks aim to reconstruct local training data from intermediate gradients exposed in the federated learning framework. Despite successful attacks, all previous methods, starting from reconstructing a single data point and then relaxing the single-image limit to batch level, are only tested under hard label constraints. Even for single-image reconstruction, we still lack an analysis-based algorithm to recover augmented soft labels. In this work, we change the focus from enlarging batchsize to investigating the hard label constraints, considering a more realistic circumstance where label smoothing and mixup techniques are used in the training process. In particular, we are the first to initiate a novel algorithm to simultaneously recover the ground-truth augmented label and the input feature of the last fully-connected layer from single-input gradients, and provide a necessary condition for any analytical-based label recovery methods. Extensive experiments testify to the label recovery accuracy, as well as the benefits to the following image reconstruction. We believe soft labels in classification tasks are worth further attention in gradient inversion attacks.

In critical applications, it is vital for classifiers to defer decision-making to humans. We propose a post-hoc method that makes existing classifiers selectively abstain from predicting certain samples. Our abstaining classifier is incentivized to maintain the original accuracy for each sub-population (i.e. no harm) while achieving a set of group fairness definitions to a user specified degree. To this end, we design an Integer Programming (IP) procedure that assigns abstention decisions for each training sample to satisfy a set of constraints. To generalize the abstaining decisions to test samples, we then train a surrogate model to learn the abstaining decisions based on the IP solutions in an end-to-end manner. We analyze the feasibility of the IP procedure to determine the possible abstention rate for different levels of unfairness tolerance and accuracy constraint for achieving no harm. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to identify the theoretical relationships between the constraint parameters and the required abstention rate. Our theoretical results are important since a high abstention rate is often infeasible in practice due to a lack of human resources. Our framework outperforms existing methods in terms of fairness disparity without sacrificing accuracy at similar abstention rates.

Current tools for machine learning fairness only admit a limited range of fairness definitions and have seen little integration with automatic differentiation libraries, despite the central role these libraries play in modern machine learning pipelines. We introduce a framework of fairness regularization terms (fairret) which quantify bias as modular objectives that are easily integrated in automatic differentiation pipelines. By employing a general definition of fairness in terms of linear-fractional statistics, a wide class of fairrets can be computed efficiently. Experiments show the behavior of their gradients and their utility in enforcing fairness with minimal loss of predictive power compared to baselines. Our contribution includes a PyTorch implementation of the fairret framework.

Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) is a family of iterative algorithms showing promising results in solving imperfect-information games. Recent novel CFR variants (e.g., CFR+, DCFR) have significantly improved the convergence rate of the vanilla CFR. The key to these CFR variants’ performance is weighting each iteration non-uniformly, i.e., discounting earlier iterations. However, these algorithms use a fixed, manually-specified scheme to weight each iteration, which enormously limits their potential. In this work, we propose Dynamic Discounted CFR (DDCFR), the first equilibrium-finding framework that discounts prior iterations using a dynamic, automatically-learned scheme. We formalize CFR’s iteration process as a carefully designed Markov decision process and transform the discounting scheme learning problem into a policy optimization problem within it. The learned discounting scheme dynamically weights each iteration on the fly using information available at runtime. Experimental results across multiple games demonstrate that DDCFR’s dynamic discounting scheme has a strong generalization ability and leads to faster convergence with improved performance. The code is available at https://github.com/rpSebastian/DDCFR.