ICML 2022spotlight97 citations

Plug & Play Attacks: Towards Robust and Flexible Model Inversion Attacks

Lukas Struppek, Dominik Hintersdorf, Antonio De Almeida Correira, Antonia Adler, Kristian Kersting

Abstract

Model inversion attacks (MIAs) aim to create synthetic images that reflect the class-wise characteristics from a target classifier’s private training data by exploiting the model’s learned knowledge. Previous research has developed generative MIAs that use generative adversarial networks (GANs) as image priors tailored to a specific target model. This makes the attacks time- and resource-consuming, inflexible, and susceptible to distributional shifts between datasets. To overcome these drawbacks, we present Plug & Play Attacks, which relax the dependency between the target model and image prior, and enable the use of a single GAN to attack a wide range of targets, requiring only minor adjustments to the attack. Moreover, we show that powerful MIAs are possible even with publicly available pre-trained GANs and under strong distributional shifts, for which previous approaches fail to produce meaningful results. Our extensive evaluation confirms the improved robustness and flexibility of Plug & Play Attacks and their ability to create high-quality images revealing sensitive class characteristics.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v162-struppek22a,
  title = 	 {Plug & Play Attacks: Towards Robust and Flexible Model Inversion Attacks},
  author =       {Struppek, Lukas and Hintersdorf, Dominik and De Almeida Correira, Antonio and Adler, Antonia and Kersting, Kristian},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {20522--20545},
  year = 	 {2022},
  editor = 	 {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Jegelka, Stefanie and Song, Le and Szepesvari, Csaba and Niu, Gang and Sabato, Sivan},
  volume = 	 {162},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {17--23 Jul},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/struppek22a/struppek22a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/struppek22a.html},
  abstract = 	 {Model inversion attacks (MIAs) aim to create synthetic images that reflect the class-wise characteristics from a target classifier’s private training data by exploiting the model’s learned knowledge. Previous research has developed generative MIAs that use generative adversarial networks (GANs) as image priors tailored to a specific target model. This makes the attacks time- and resource-consuming, inflexible, and susceptible to distributional shifts between datasets. To overcome these drawbacks, we present Plug & Play Attacks, which relax the dependency between the target model and image prior, and enable the use of a single GAN to attack a wide range of targets, requiring only minor adjustments to the attack. Moreover, we show that powerful MIAs are possible even with publicly available pre-trained GANs and under strong distributional shifts, for which previous approaches fail to produce meaningful results. Our extensive evaluation confirms the improved robustness and flexibility of Plug & Play Attacks and their ability to create high-quality images revealing sensitive class characteristics.}
}