A Research Agenda: Dynamic Models to Defend Against Correlated Attacks

Abstract: In this article I describe a research agenda for securing machine learning models against adversarial inputs at test time. This article does not present results but instead shares some of my thoughts about where I think that the field needs to go. Modern machine learning works very well on I.I.D. data: data for which each example is drawn {\em independently} and for which the distribution generating each example is {\em identical}. When these assumptions are relaxed, modern machine learning can perform very poorly. When machine learning is used in contexts where security is a concern, it is desirable to design models that perform well even when the input is designed by a malicious adversary. So far most research in this direction has focused on an adversary who violates the {\em identical} assumption, and imposes some kind of restricted worst-case distribution shift. I argue that machine learning security researchers should also address the problem of relaxing the {\em independence} assumption and that current strategies designed for robustness to distribution shift will not do so. I recommend {\em dynamic models} that change each time they are run as a potential solution path to this problem, and show an example of a simple attack using correlated data that can be mitigated by a simple dynamic defense. This is not intended as a real-world security measure, but as a recommendation to explore this research direction and develop more realistic defenses.