The Unseen Hand: Manipulating Model Fairness and SHAP with Targeted Identity Re-Association Attacks
As machine learning models grow more influential and opaque, algorithmic fairness and explainability are critical for ensuring accountability. However, we demonstrate that these auditing mechanisms are themselves vulnerable to subtle manipulation, camouflaging the influence of protected features. While prior work on data-agnostic attacks has exposed this vulnerability, they leave behind detectable artifacts that compromise their stealth. We introduce Targeted Identity Re-Association (TIRA) attacks, a novel family of attacks that iteratively and probabilistically manipulate a model's outputs without requiring access to the model's internals or feature representations. We formalize two algo...
| Authors | Sannaan Khan, Muhammad U. S. Khan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 22 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.