We present Generative Adversarial Privacy and Fairness (GAPF), a data-driven framework for learning private and fair representations of the data. GAPF leverages recent advances in adversarial learning to allow a data holder to learn "universal" representations that decouple a set of sensitive attributes from the rest of the dataset. Under GAPF, finding the optimal decorrelation scheme is formulated as a constrained minimax game between a generative decorrelator and an adversary. We show that for appropriately chosen adversarial loss functions, GAPF provides privacy guarantees against strong information-theoretic adversaries and enforces demographic parity. We also evaluate the performance of GAPF on multi-dimensional Gaussian mixture models and real datasets, and show how a designer can certify that representations learned under an adversary with a fixed architecture perform well against more complex adversaries. The use of deep learning algorithms for data analytics has recently seen unprecedented success for a variety of problems such as image classification, natural language processing, and prediction of consumer behavior, electricity use, political preferences, to name a few. The success of these algorithms hinges on the availability of large datasets, that often contain sensitive information, and thus, may facilitate learning models that inherit societal biases leading to unintended algorithmic discrimination on legally protected groups such as race or gender. This, in turn, has led to privacy and fairness concerns and a growing body of research focused on developing representations of the dataset with fairness and/or privacy guarantees. These techniques predominantly involve designing randomizing schemes, and in recent years, distinct approaches with provable statistical privacy or fairness guarantees have emerged.In the context of privacy, preserving the utility of published datasets while simultaneously providing provable privacy guarantees is a well-known challenge. While context-free privacy solutions, such as differential privacy BID10 a; BID7 BID8 , provide strong worst-case privacy guarantees, they often lead to a significant reduction in utility. In contrast, context-aware privacy solutions, e.g., mutual information privacy BID31 BID5 BID33 BID32 BID3 ), achieve improved privacy-utility tradeoff, but assume that the data holder has access to dataset statistics.In the context of fairness, machine learning models seek to maximize predictive accuracy. Fairness concerns arise when models learned from datasets that include patterns of societal bias and discrimination inherit such biases. Thus, there is a need for actively decorrelating sensitive and non-sensitive data. In the context of publishing datasets or meaningful representations that can be "universally" used for a variety of learning tasks, modifying the training data is the most appropriate and is the focus of this work. Fairness can then be achieved by carefully designing objective functions which approximate a specific fairness definition while simultaneously ensuring maximal utility (Zemel et al., 2013; BID6 BID16 . This, in turn, requires dataset statistics.Adversarial learning approaches for context-aware privacy and fairness have been studied extensively BID13 BID0 BID30 BID20 BID36 BID4 BID27 Zhang et al., 2018) . They allow the data curator to cleverly decorrelate the sensitive attributes from the rest of the dataset. These approaches overcome the lack of statistical knowledge by taking a data-driven approach that leverages recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs) BID17 BID28 . However, most existing efforts focus on extensive empirical studies without theoretical verification and focus predominantly on providing guarantees for a specific classification task. This work introduces a general framework for context-aware privacy and fairness that we call generative adversarial privacy and fairness (GAPF) (see FIG0 . We provide precise connections to information-theoretic privacy and fairness formulations and derive game-theoretically optimal decorrelation schemes to compare against those learned directly from the data. While our framework can be generalized to learn an arbitrary representation using an encoder-decoder structure, this paper primarily focuses on learning private/fair representations of the data (of the same dimension).Our Contributions. We list our main contributions below.1. We introduce GAPF, a framework for creating private/fair representations of data using an adversarially trained conditional generative model. Unlike existing works, GAPF can create representations that are useful for a variety of classification tasks, without requiring the designer to model these tasks at training time. We validate this observation via experiments on the GENKI (Whitehill & Movellan, 2012) and HAR BID2 datasets.2. We show that via the choice of the adversarial loss function, our framework can capture a rich class of statistical and information-theoretic adversaries. This allows us to compare data-driven approaches directly against strong inferential adversaries (e.g., a maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) adversary with access to dataset statistics). We also show that by carefully designing the loss functions in the GAPF framework, we can enforce demographic parity.3. We make precise comparison between data-driven privacy/fairness methods and the minimax game-theoretic GAPF formulation. For Gaussian mixture data, we derive game-theoretically optimal decorrelation schemes and compare them with those that are directly learned in a datadriven fashion to show that the gap between theory and practice is negligible. Furthermore, we propose using mutual information estimators to verify that no adversary (regardless of their computational power) can reliably infer the sensitive attribute from the learned representation.Related work. In the context of publishing datasets with privacy and utility guarantees, a number of similar approaches have been recently considered. We briefly review them here. A detailed literature review is included in Appendix A. DP-based obfuscators for data publishing have been considered in BID18 BID26 . These novel approaches leverage non-generative minimax filters and deep auto-encoders to allow non-malicious entities to learn some public features from the filtered data, while preventing malicious entities from learning other sensitive features. However, DP can still incur a significant utility loss since it assumes worst-case dataset statistics. Our approach models a rich class of randomization-based schemes via a generative model that allows the generative decorrelator to tailor the noise to the dataset.Our work is closely related to adversarial neural cryptography BID0 , learning censored representations BID13 , privacy preserving image sharing BID30 , privacy-preserving adversarial networks BID36 , and adversarially learning fair representation BID27 in which adversarial learning is used to learn how to protect communications by encryption or hide/remove sensitive information or generate fair representation of the data. Similar to these problems, our model includes a minimax formulation and uses adversarial neural networks to learn decorrelation schemes that prevent an adversary from inferring the sensitive variable. However, most of these papers use non-generative auto-encoders to remove sensitive information. Instead, we use a GANs-like approach to learn decorrelation schemes . We also go beyond in formulating a game-theoretic setting subject to a distortion constraint which allows us to learn private/fair representation for a variety of learning tasks. Enforcing the distortion constraint calls for a new training process that relies on the Penalty method or Augmented Lagrangian method presented in Appendix C. We show that our framework captures a rich class of statistical and information-theoretic adversaries by changing the loss function. We also compare the performance of data-driven privacy/fairness methods and the minimax game-theoretic GAPF.Fair representations using information-theoretic objective functions and constrained optimization have been proposed in BID6 BID16 . However, both approaches require the knowledge of dataset statistics, which is very difficult to obtain for real datasets. We overcome the issue of statistical knowledge by taking a data-driven approach , i.e., learning the representation from the data directly via adversarial models. In contrast to in-processing approaches that modify learning algorithms to ensure fair predictions (e..g, using linear programs in BID11 BID14 or via adversarial learning approach in ( Zhang et al., 2018) ), we focus on a pre-processing approach to ensure fairness for a variety of learning tasks. Using GANs to generate synthetic non-sensitive attributes and labels which ensure fairness while preserving the utility of the data (predicting the label) has been studied in (Xu et al., 2018; BID34 . Rather than using a conditional-generative model to generate synthetic data, we focus on creating fair/private representations of the original data while preserving the utility of the representations for a variety of learning tasks by learning nonlinear compression and noise adding schemes via a generative adversarial model. We have introduced a novel adversarial learning framework for creating private/fair representations of the data with verifiable guarantees. GAPF allows the data holder to learn the decorrelation scheme directly from the dataset (to be published) without requiring access to dataset statistics. Under GAPF, finding the optimal decorrelation scheme is formulated as a game between two players: a generative decorrelator and an adversary. We have shown that for appropriately chosen loss functions, GAPF can provide guarantees against strong information-theoretic adversaries, such as MAP and MI adversaries. It can also enforce fairness, quantified via demographic parity by using the log-loss function. We have also validated the performance of GAPF on Gaussian mixture models and real datasets. There are several fundamental questions that we seek to address. An immediate one is to develop techniques to rigorously benchmark data-driven results for large datasets against computable theoretical guarantees. More broadly, it will be interesting to investigate the robustness and convergence speed of the decorrelation schemes learned in a data-driven fashion. In this paper, we connect our objective function in GAPF with demographic parity. Since there is no single metric for fairness, this leaves room for designing objective functions that link to other fairness metrics such as equalized odds and equal opportunity.
We present Generative Adversarial Privacy and Fairness (GAPF), a data-driven framework for learning private and fair representations with certified privacy/fairness guarantees This paper uses a GAN model to provide an overview of the related work to Private/Fair Representation Learning (PRL). This paper presents an adversarial-based approach for private and fair representations by learned distortion of data that minimises the dependency on sensitive variables while the degree of distortion is constrained. The authors describe a framework of how to learn a demographic parity representation that can be used to train certain classifiers.