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arXiv · 2306.04505

Hardness of Deceptive Certificate Selection

Stephan Wäldchen
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Abstract

Recent progress towards theoretical interpretability guarantees for AI has been made with classifiers that are based on interactive proof systems. A prover selects a certificate from the datapoint and sends it to a verifier who decides the class. In the context of machine learning, such a certificate can be a feature that is informative of the class. For a setup with high soundness and completeness, the exchanged certificates must have a high mutual information with the true class of the datapoint. However, this guarantee relies on a bound on the Asymmetric Feature Correlation of the dataset, a property that so far is difficult to estimate for high-dimensional data. It was conjectured in Wäldchen et al. that it is computationally hard to exploit the AFC, which is what we prove here. We consider a malicious prover-verifier duo that aims to exploit the AFC to achieve high completeness and soundness while using uninformative certificates. We show that this task is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard and cannot be approximated better than $\mathcal{O}(m^{1/8 - ε})$, where $m$ is the number of possible certificates, for $ε>0$ under the Dense-vs-Random conjecture. This is some evidence that AFC should not prevent the use of interactive classification for real-world tasks, as it is computationally hard to be exploited.

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BibTeXRIS

Stephan Wäldchen. 2023-06-07. Hardness of Deceptive Certificate Selection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04505

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