Title:
Responsible machine learning: supporting privacy preservation and normative alignment with multi-agent simulation
Responsible machine learning: supporting privacy preservation and normative alignment with multi-agent simulation
Author(s)
Byrd, Charles David
Advisor(s)
Balch, Tucker
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Abstract
This dissertation aims to advance responsible machine learning through multi-agent simulation (MAS). I introduce and demonstrate an open source, multi-domain discrete event simulation framework and use it to: (1) improve state-of-the-art privacy-preserving federated learning and (2) construct a novel method for normatively-aligned learning from synthetic negative examples.
Due to their complexity and capacity, the training of modern machine learning (ML) models can require vast user-collected data sets. The current formulation of federated learning arose in 2016 after repeated exposure of sensitive user information from centralized data stores where mobile and wearable training data was aggregated. Privacy-preserving federated learning (PPFL) soon added stochastic and cryptographic layers to protect against additional vectors of data exposure. Recent state of the art protocols have combined differential privacy (DP) and secure multiparty computation (MPC) to keep client training data set parameters private from an ``honest but curious'' server which is legitimately involved in the learning process, but attempting to infer information it should not have.
Investigation of PPFL can be cost prohibitive if each iteration of a proposed experimental protocol is distributed to virtual computational nodes geolocated around the world. It can also be inaccurate when locally simulated without concern for client parallelism, accurate timekeeping, or computation and communication loads. In this work, a recent PPFL protocol is instantiated as a single-threaded MAS to show that its model accuracy, deployed parallel running time, and resistance to inference of client model parameters can be inexpensively evaluated. The protocol is then extended using oblivious distributed differential privacy to a new state of the art secure against attacks of collusion among all except one participant, with an empirical demonstration that the new protocol improves privacy with no loss of accuracy to the final model.
State of the art reinforcement learning (RL) is also increasingly complex and hard to interpret, such that a sequence of individually innocuous actions may produce an unexpectedly harmful result. Safe RL seeks to avoid these results through techniques like reward variance reduction, error state prediction, or constrained exploration of the state-action space. Development of the field has been heavily influenced by robotics and finance, and thus it is primarily concerned with physical failures like a helicopter crash or a robot-human workplace collision, or monetary failures like the depletion of an investment account. The related field of Normative RL is concerned with obeying the behavioral expectations of a broad human population, like respecting personal space or not sneaking up behind people. Because normative behavior often implicates safety, for example the assumption that an autonomous navigation robot will not walk through a human to reach its goal more quickly, there is significant overlap between the two areas.
There are problem domains not easily addressed by current approaches in safe or normative RL, where the undesired behavior is subtle, violates legal or ethical rather than physical or monetary constraints, and may be composed of individually-normative actions. In this work, I consider an intelligent stock trading agent that maximizes profit but may inadvertently learn ``spoofing'', a form of illegal market manipulation that can be difficult to detect. Using a financial market based on MAS, I safely coerce a variety of spoofing behaviors, learn to distinguish them from other profit-driven strategies, and carefully analyze the empirical results. I then demonstrate how this spoofing recognizer can be used as a normative guide to train an intelligent trading agent that will generate positive returns while avoiding spoofing behaviors, even if their adoption would increase short-term profits. I believe this contribution to normative RL, of deriving an method for normative alignment from synthetic non-normative action sequences, should generalize to many other problem domains.
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Date Issued
2021-08-03
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Dissertation