Data privacy has emerged as an important issue as data-driven deep learning
has been an essential component of modern machine learning systems. For
instance, there could be a potential privacy risk of machine learning systems
via the model inversion attack, whose goal is to reconstruct the input data
from the latent representation of deep networks. Our work aims at learning a
privacy-preserving and task-oriented representation to defend against such
model inversion attacks. Specifically, we propose an adversarial reconstruction
learning framework that prevents the latent representations decoded into
original input data. By simulating the expected behavior of adversary, our
framework is realized by minimizing the negative pixel reconstruction loss or
the negative feature reconstruction (i.e., perceptual distance) loss. We
validate the proposed method on face attribute prediction, showing that our
method allows protecting visual privacy with a small decrease in utility
performance. In addition, we show the utility-privacy trade-off with different
choices of hyperparameter for negative perceptual distance loss at training,
allowing service providers to determine the right level of privacy-protection
with a certain utility performance. Moreover, we provide an extensive study
with different selections of features, tasks, and the data to further analyze
their influence on privacy protection.