Multi-Trigger-Key: Towards Multi-Task Privacy-Preserving In Deep Learning

Ren Wang, Zhe Xu, Alfred Hero

Abstract: Deep learning-based Multi-Task Classification (MTC) is widely used in applications like facial attribute and healthcare that warrant strong privacy guarantees. In this work, we aim to protect sensitive information in the inference phase of MTC and propose a novel Multi-Trigger-Key (MTK) framework to achieve the privacy-preserving objective. MTK associates each secured task in the multi-task dataset with a specifically designed trigger-key. The true information can be revealed by adding the trigger-key if the user is authorized. We obtain such an MTK model by training it with a newly generated training set. To address the information leakage malaise resulting from correlations among different tasks, we generalize the training process by incorporating an MTK decoupling process with a controllable trade-off between the protective efficacy and the model performance. Theoretical guarantees and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the privacy protection without appreciable hindering on the model performance.