Information Laundering for Model Privacy

In this work, we propose information laundering, a novel framework for enhancing model privacy. Unlike data privacy that concerns the protection of raw data information, model privacy aims to protect an already-learned model that is to be deployed for public use. The private model can be obtained from general learning methods, and its deployment means that it will return a deterministic or random response for a given input query. An informationlaundered model consists of probabilistic components that deliberately maneuver the intended input and output for queries to the model, so the model's adversarial acquisition is less likely. Under the proposed framework, we develop an information-theoretic principle to quantify the fundamental tradeoffs between model utility and privacy leakage and derive the optimal design. An emerging number of applications involve the following user-scenario. Alice developed a model that takes a specific query as input and calculates a response as output. The model is a stochastic black-box that may represent a novel type of ensemble models, a known deep neural network architecture with sophisticated parameter tuning, or a physical law described by stochastic differential equations.