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InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place

nicholas.carlini.com

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Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place

#41

Post by twic »

> There's this thing that machine learning research papers do where they propose Algorithm A, say in words it works, and then prove Theorem T. The problem is that Theorem T is often completely disjoint from whether or not Algorithm A works at all. Lipton and Steinhardt call these spurious theorems.

Is this unique to, or particularly common in, machine learning?

If so, that is scary - what on earth is going on?

Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place

#43

Post by ilyagr »

cbsks wrote: post #42

What is the sign of a pixel in this context? I don’t have a ML background so I’m used to pixels with unsigned RGB components.

I was also confused by this. I guess that it might be equivalent to randomly flipping the top bit of the unsigned RGB components. The "absolute value" would always set the top bit to 1.

Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place

#44

Post by didibus »

didibus wrote: post #16

It seems this award would have awarded anything as 2nd place, what if there was nothing else better? Does the award really tell you how great this is, or maybe it simply shows how little progress has been made. Edit: And I completely agree with author about Paper in the field need to do better.

Instead of downvotes, I'd appreciate being suggested alternative papers that same year that made more progress towards training data privacy in ML algorithms than the one mentioned in the article, and which should have won the prize instead.

Otherwise, it seems my assessment would hold. A ranking is relative, so doesn't tell you much of absolute progress towards the goal.

Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place

#45

Post by jeffe »

lmilcin wrote: post #25
kvathupo wrote: post #15

> "They ... haven't yet (after a month) accepted our break on their Challenge leaderboard." I think this is the most abhorrent aspect: it's not in the spirit of science to arbitrarily delay findings

No it is not. Given the rest of the description I find it completely consistent with their modus operandi. Anyway, why delaying results should be considered the worst transgression? I think dishonesty is the biggest problem here.

The many spurious/misleading claims in this paper at least have some plausible deniability through vague language and complexity. Omitting a clear cut falsification of their methodology that they themselves put forward as a challenge is against basic scientific principles.
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