Privacy-Accuracy Trade-Off of Inference as Service

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a general framework to provide a desirable trade-off between inference accuracy and privacy protection in the inference as service scenario. Instead of sending data directly to the server, the user will preprocess the data through a privacy-preserving mapping, which will increase privacy protection but reduce inference accuracy. To properly address the trade-off between privacy protection and inference accuracy, we formulate an optimization problem to find the optimal privacy-preserving mapping. Even though the problem is non-convex in general, we characterize nice structures of the problem and develop an iterative algorithm to find the desired privacy-preserving mapping.