InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
nicholas.carlini.com
InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
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Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#2Unfortunate for the award, but sincerely think this type of open criticism is needed in science. Especially in the realm of machine learning.
Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#3The best(?) part of the article is this:
> In the award ceramony [sic], the Bell Labs researcher presenting the award explicitly said he doesn't understand how InstaHide is secure, but, and I quote, “it works nonetheless”. No! It does not.
Bell Labs used to have a wonderful reputation. Not so much anymore, I suppose.
Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#4I think I agree with a idea that something that is fundamentally technically unsound probably shouldn't get an award.
Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#5If you enjoy reading Carlini tear into papers, also check out the following:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.08347.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.02322.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03286.pdf
He definitely doesn't mince words, but it's hard to be mad when he always makes very valid points. And I say that as a secondary author on one the criticized methods (not InstaHide).
Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#6The article resonates with me a lot, and reminded of the couple of years of personal experience of applied machine learning in another field of science; because the points made are exactly what I encountered then and made me quit my job.
There is a lot of machine learning snake oil out there, even in the most prestigious journals. The issue is that most people wouldn't know about it until they actually try to reproduce those results (if they can at all in the first place).
It is a huge issue now that machine learning has made its way into every field of research, while almost nobody has adequate training to even gauge what is and isn't questionable. Even the grad students who end up doing all the "hard work" usually don't have much of an idea of what exactly they hacked together and how to access its validity.
The crazy thing is that, despite all of this, you can still get ahead if you have know just slightly more buzzwords than others and have a paper or two (don't have to be first author) to show for. At the end of the day, I suppose all of this is nothing new (machine learning practitioners are the new SEO consultants?), and I'm just venting my frustration for not being able to accept this is how things work.
Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#7Well, that was a fairly comprehensive takedown. Kudos to the author for mentioning the things the primary author did well and correctly put the primary responsibility on the senior researchers.
ML privacy isn't at all in my wheelhouse, but I did do computer security research in school. The author makes a good point that researchers need to be ready for their methods to be broken. More importantly though, researchers have an ethical responsibility to publicize when a vulnerability in their work is discovered, so it's not used improperly.
I think this is something that's very clear in the security community, but isn't the norm in the machine learning community. Hopefully privacy researchers in ML take a few notes from their colleagues that have been doing computer security sooner rather than later.
Finally, it's pretty disappointing to see how far Bell Labs has fallen. I won't spoil the article, but the quote from the Bell Labs judge is telling.
Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#8The article resonates with me a lot, and reminded of the couple of years of personal experience of applied machine learning in another field of science; because the points made are exactly what I encountered then and made me quit my job. There is a lot of machine learning snake oil out there, even in the most prestigious journals. The issue is that most people wouldn't know about it until they actually try to reprodu…
> (machine learning practitioners are the new SEO consultants?)
If we want to continue the snake oil salesman analogy, SEO consultants were soothsayers, attempting to divine meaning from The Algorithm of Great Google.
Now the apothecaries have begun to legitimize their potion making into tonics, but there is still room for a charlatan or two to push hodgepodge concoctions onto the unsuspecting Product Manager or CTO.
Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#9Nice breakdown.
It's a small thing, but I'm really grateful that he very specifically aimed at the senior authors here. While I'm not sure that the first author can be completely absolved of responsibility (due to the simple fact that they are listed as an author), the power dynamics in academia are absurdly skewed and it's nice to see a tacit acknowledgement of that in an otherwise (justifiably) scathing critique.
Re: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place
#10Nice breakdown. It's a small thing, but I'm really grateful that he very specifically aimed at the senior authors here. While I'm not sure that the first author can be completely absolved of responsibility (due to the simple fact that they are listed as an author), the power dynamics in academia are absurdly skewed and it's nice to see a tacit acknowledgement of that in an otherwise (justifiably) scathing critique.
i'm torn. I'd like to agree with the sentiment of the OP, but then when I surmise that the 1rst author will use this article as the basis for their job talk, and probably get something somewhere sunny and warm, I have second thoughts.