Playing to Learn Better: Repeated Games for Adversarial Learning with Multiple Classifiers

We consider the problem of prediction by a machine learning algorithm, called learner, within an adversarial learning setting. The learner's task is to correctly predict the class of data passed to it as a query. However, along with queries containing clean data, the learner could also receive malicious or adversarial queries from an adversary. The objective of the adversary is to evade the learner's prediction mechanism by sending adversarial queries that result in erroneous class prediction by the learner, while the learner's objective is to reduce the incorrect prediction of these adversarial queries without degrading the prediction quality of clean queries. We propose a game theory-based technique called a Repeated Bayesian Sequential Game where the learner interacts repeatedly with a model of the adversary using self play to determine the distribution of adversarial versus clean queries. It then strategically selects a classifier from a set of pre-trained classifiers that balances the likelihood of correct prediction for the query along with reducing the costs to use the classifier. We have evaluated our proposed technique using clean and adversarial text data with deep neural network-based classifiers and shown that the learner can select an appropriate classifier that is commensurate with the query type (clean or adversarial) while remaining aware of the cost to use the classifier.

A Survey of Game Theoretic Approaches for Adversarial Machine Learning in Cybersecurity Tasks

Machine learning techniques are currently used extensively for automating various cybersecurity tasks. Most of these techniques utilize supervised learning algorithms that rely on training the algorithm to classify incoming data into different categories, using data encountered in the relevant domain. A critical vulnerability of these algorithms is that they are susceptible to adversarial attacks where a malicious entity called an adversary deliberately alters the training data to misguide the learning algorithm into making classification errors. Adversarial attacks could render the learning algorithm unsuitable to use and leave critical systems vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks. Our paper provides a detailed survey of the state-of-the-art techniques that are used to make a machine learning algorithm robust against adversarial attacks using the computational framework of game theory. We also discuss open problems and challenges and possible directions for further research that would make deep machine learning-based systems more robust and reliable for cybersecurity tasks.