Building trustworthy machine learning systems in adversarial environments

Modern AI systems, particularly with the rise of big data and deep learning in the last decade, have greatly improved our daily life and at the same time created a long list of controversies. AI systems are often subject to malicious and stealthy subversion that jeopardizes their efficacy. Many of these issues stem from the data-driven nature of machine learning. While big data and deep models significantly boost the accuracy of machine learning models, they also create opportunities for adversaries to tamper with models or extract sensitive data. Malicious data providers can compromise machine learning systems by supplying false data and intermediate computation results. Even a well-trained model can be deceived to misbehave by an adversary who provides carefully designed inputs. Furthermore, curious parties can derive sensitive information of the training data by interacting with a machine-learning model. These adversarial scenarios, known as poisoning attack, adversarial example attack, and inference attack, have demonstrated that security, privacy, and robustness have become more important than ever for AI to gain wider adoption and societal trust. To address these problems, we proposed the following solutions: (1) FLARE, which detects and mitigates stealthy poisoning attacks by leveraging latent space representations; (2) MANDA, which detects adversarial examples by utilizing evaluations from diverse sources, i.e, model-based prediction and data-based evaluation; (3) FeCo which enhances the robustness of machine learning-based network intrusion detection systems by introducing a novel representation learning method; and (4) DP-FedMeta, which preserves data privacy and improves the privacy-accuracy trade-off in machine learning systems through a novel adaptive clipping mechanism.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Wang, Ning

Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair

• Lou, Wenjing
• Hou, Yiwei Thomas

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Freeman, Laura J.
• Chen, Yimin
• Stavrou, Angelos
• Wang, Yue J.

• adversarial machine learning
• anomaly detection
• differential privacy

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:37067

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/115222