Data Poisoning Attacks Against Outcome Interpretations of Predictive Models

The past decades have witnessed significant progress towards improving the accuracy of predictions powered by complex machine learning models. Despite much success, the lack of model interpretability prevents the usage of these techniques in life-critical systems such as medical diagnosis and self-driving systems. Recently, the interpretability issue has received much attention, and one critical task is to explain why a predictive model makes a specific decision. We refer to this task as outcome interpretation. Many outcome interpretation methods have been developed to produce human-understandable interpretations by utilizing intermediate results of the machine learning models, such as gradients and model parameters.

Although the effectiveness of outcome interpretation approaches has been shown in a benign environment, their robustness against data poisoning attacks (i.e., attacks at the training phase) has not been studied. As the first work towards this direction, we aim to answer an important question: Can training-phase adversarial samples manipulate the outcome interpretation of target samples? To answer this question, we propose a data poisoning attack framework named IMF (Interpretation Manipulation Framework), which can manipulate the interpretations of target samples produced by representative outcome interpretation methods. Extensive evaluations verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed attack strategies on two real-world datasets.