This is a Plain English Papers summary of a research paper called Undetectable Backdoors in Outsourced Machine Learning Models: A Theoretical Vulnerability. If you like these kinds of analysis, you should join AImodels.fyi or follow us on Twitter.

Overview

• Users may delegate the task of training machine learning models to a service provider due to the high computational cost and technical expertise required.
• The paper shows how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier.
• The backdoored classifier behaves normally on the surface, but the learner maintains a mechanism to change the classification of any input with a slight perturbation.
• The backdoor mechanism is hidden and cannot be detected by any computationally-bounded observer.
• The paper presents two frameworks for planting undetectable backdoors, with different guarantees.

Plain English Explanation

Building powerful machine learning models can be extremely computationally expensive and technically complex. As a result, users may choose to outsource the training of these models to a service provider. However, this paper demonstrates that a malicious service provider could ...

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