Powered by machine learning services in the cloud, numerous learning-driven
mobile applications are gaining popularity in the market. As deep learning
tasks are mostly computation-intensive, it has become a trend to process raw
data on devices and send the deep neural network (DNN) features to the cloud,
where the features are further processed to return final results. However,
there is always unexpected leakage with the release of features, with which an
adversary could infer a significant amount of information about the original
data. We propose a privacy-preserving reinforcement learning framework on top
of the mobile cloud infrastructure from the perspective of DNN structures. The
framework aims to learn a policy to modify the base DNNs to prevent information
leakage while maintaining high inference accuracy. The policy can also be
readily transferred to large-size DNNs to speed up learning. Extensive
evaluations on a variety of DNNs have shown that our framework can successfully
find privacy-preserving DNN structures to defend different privacy attacks.