Reconstruction Attack on Instance Encoding for Language Understanding

Shangyu Xie, Yuan Hong


Abstract
A private learning scheme TextHide was recently proposed to protect the private text data during the training phase via so-called instance encoding. We propose a novel reconstruction attack to break TextHide by recovering the private training data, and thus unveil the privacy risks of instance encoding. We have experimentally validated the effectiveness of the reconstruction attack with two commonly-used datasets for sentence classification. Our attack would advance the development of privacy preserving machine learning in the context of natural language processing.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.154
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2038–2044
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.154
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.154
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shangyu Xie and Yuan Hong. 2021. Reconstruction Attack on Instance Encoding for Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2038–2044, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reconstruction Attack on Instance Encoding for Language Understanding (Xie & Hong, EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2021.emnlp-main.154.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2021.emnlp-main.154.mp4
Data
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