Contract type : Fixed-term contract
Level of qualifications required : PhD or equivalent
Fonction : Post-Doctoral Research Visit
The Inria Centre at Rennes University is one of Inria's nine centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Centre is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc.
AI-based models are now core to a wide range of applications, including highly critical ones. The stakes are considerable for companies or institutions deploying them, as their training amounts to up to a billion dollars (e.g. for the training of ChatGPT). This clearly calls for defending them against attacks, like copy/extraction. In parallel, institutions such as state regulators have to ensure that these models operate according to law, in particular with regards to possible discrimination [1]. Researchers are then tasked to provide algorithms to auditors for assessing important metrics regarding deployed AI-based models. In such black-box audits, where an auditor has no access to the remotely operated model's internals, the goal is to stealthily (i.e. with a few queries only) estimate some metrics, such as fairness [6].
Interestingly, and this has not yet been mentioned in the literature, this audit setup is very close to offensive information gain, from a conceptual standpoint. Indeed, potential attackers are incentivized to try and leak information out of deployed models [4,10]. Motivations range from economic intelligence, obtaining implementation details, to simply avoiding development costs by copying deployed models. An auditor is interested in stealthy model observation [3], to avoid disrupting the audited model by using too many queries. Identically, an attacker also desire stealthiness, here to avoid being detected and cut off. In particular, auditors generally want to obtain precise property estimation, yet confined to a single feature
(e.g. male/female fairness), while attackers aim at having a global picture of the model (for basic copy, or evading some parameter set). Thus, there is an avenue to devise offensive methods in between stealthy audits and global attacks, to try and leak novel model characteristics. The ambition of our group is to bridge the gap between these two critical setups: legal auditing and offensive security, in the domain of modern deployed AI models. From this unique standpoint, and from the body of work in the field of AI auditing, we expect to find new insights for attacking and defending deployed AI models, by finding novel angles. For instance, we proposed a unified way to approach model fingerprinting [2] that is of interest for an auditor to guess which model she is observing on a platform; we conjecture that leveraging such an approach to measure the evolution in time of such a model (does the model changes due to updates?) is of core interest for an attacker, as she can derive what is at play at the company hosting this model. This could provide ground for the attacker for economic intelligence, while leaking some precious information that has to be defended by the attacked company.
A striking remark when looking at the current types of attacks on AI models is their quantity and apparent independence (see [10] Fig. 3):
each is treated as a separate domain. In addition to this list of attacks, we claim that an audit may be viewed as the leak of a feature from a production model, and must be considered as a potential threat.
In that light, clarifications in the relation between these attacks might come from a systematic study of how they relate with regards to the setup they operate in, versus the information gain they permit. We propose to work on a hierarchy of attacks, that will uncover the smallest attacks (in terms of assumptions and scope) and how they might be composed into larger attacks, and so on. This hierarchy will reveal unexplored configurations, where several simple attacks will be combined to build richer attacks. This hierarchy will provide the missing link between audits and AI security, bridging the two in a formal way. The postdoc candidate will leverage algorithmic background, to devise a hierarchy, in a parallel to the Herlihy hierarchy in algorithms. We intend to use the notion of
"distinguishability" [14] as a hierarchy backbone (to assess if an attack leaks data permitting strong or weak distinguishability of models). In particular, the field of "property testing" will be related to this hierarchy.
# References
[1] Le Merrer, E., Pons, R., & Tredan, G. (2024). Algorithmic audits of algorithms, and the law. AI and Ethics, 4(4),
1365-1375.
[2] Godinot, A., Le Merrer, E., Penzo, C., Taïani, F., & Tredan, G. (2025). Queries, Representation & Detection: The
Next 100 Model Fingerprinting Schemes. In AAAI.
[3] Le Merrer, E., & Tredan, G. (2020) Remote explainability faces the bouncer problem. Nature machine intelligence,
2(9), 529-539.
[4] Maho, T., Furon, T., & Le Merrer, E. (2021). Surfree: a fast surrogate-free black-box attack. In CVPR.
[5] Godinot, A., Le Merrer, E., Tredan, G., Penzo, C., & Taïani, F. (2024). Under manipulations, are some AI models harder to audit?. In IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning.
[6] de Vos, M., Dhasade, A., Garcia Bourrée, J., Kermarrec, A. M., Le Merrer, E., Rottembourg, B., & Tredan, G. (2024).
Fairness auditing with multi-agent collaboration. In ECAI.
[7] Le Merrer, E., Perez, P., & Tredan, G. (2020). Adversarial frontier stitching for remote neural network watermarking. Neural Computing and Applications, 32(13), 9233-9244.
[8] Le Merrer, E., Morgan, B., & Tredan, G. (2021). Setting the record straighter on shadow banning. In INFOCOM.
[9] Maho, T., Furon, T., & Le Merrer, E. (2022). Randomized smoothing under attack: How good is it in practice?. In
ICASSP.
[10]Ma et al., « Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model Safety». arXiv:2502.05206v3
[11]Yan, T., & Zhang, C. (2022). Active fairness auditing. In ICML.
[12]Apruzzese, G., Anderson, H. S., Dambra, S., Freeman, D., Pierazzi, F., & Roundy, K. (2023). “Real attackers don't compute gradients”: bridging the gap between adversarial ml research and practice. In 2023 IEEE conference on secure and trustworthy machine learning.
[13]Fukuchi, K., Hara, S., & Maehara, T. (2020). Faking fairness via stealthily biased sampling. In AAAI.
[14]Attiya, H., & Rajsbaum, S. (2020). Indistinguishability. Communications of the ACM, 63(5), 90-99.
[15]ANSSI (2024). Security recommandations for a generative AI system. ANSSI-PA-102.
Monthly gross salary amounting to 2788 euros
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Defence Security :
This position is likely to be situated in a restricted area (ZRR), as defined in Decree No. 2011-1425 relating to the protection of national scientific and technical potential (PPST).Authorisation to enter an area is granted by the director of the unit, following a favourable Ministerial decision, as defined in the decree of 3 July 2012 relating to the PPST. An unfavourable Ministerial decision in respect of a position situated in a ZRR would result in the cancellation of the appointment.
Recruitment Policy :
As part of its diversity policy, all Inria positions are accessible to people with disabilities.
Inria, the French national institute for research in digital science and technology, supports the French government in national research and innovation strategies in the digital field, acting as Digital Programs Agency. Inria leads over 300 research and innovation projects with its 3,500 scientists, engineers, and support staff, in partnership with universities and the digital ecosystem (businesses, entrepreneurs, and public stakeholders). Together, we explore strategic fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, cloud technologies, digital transformation in healthcare, digital twins, and digital technologies for defence. We develop practical solutions such as software, tech startups, partnerships with national companies, and cutting-edge training programmes. Our goal is to drive scientific, technological, and industrial excellence to ensure France’s digital sovereignty.
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