SeqPATE: Differentially Private Text Generation via Knowledge Distillation

Protecting the privacy of user data is crucial for text generation models, which can leak sensitive information during generation. Differentially private (DP) learning methods provide guarantees against identifying the existence of a training sample from model outputs. PATE is a recent DP learning algorithm that achieves high utility with strong privacy protection on training samples. However, text generation models output tokens sequentially in a large output space; the classic PATE algorithm is not customized for this setting. Furthermore, PATE works well to protect sample-level privacy, but is not designed to protect phrases in samples.