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Towards Understanding Generalization in DP-GD: A Case Study in Training Two-Layer CNNs

Shi, Zhongjie, Wang, Puyu, Zhang, Chenyang, Cao, Yuan

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Modern deep learning techniques focus on extracting intricate information from data to achieve accurate predictions. However, the training datasets may be crowdsourced and include sensitive information, such as personal contact details, financial data, and medical records. As a result, there is a growing emphasis on developing privacy-preserving training algorithms for neural networks that maintain good performance while preserving privacy. In this paper, we investigate the generalization and privacy performances of the differentially private gradient descent (DP-GD) algorithm, which is a private variant of the gradient descent (GD) by incorporating additional noise into the gradients during each iteration. Moreover, we identify a concrete learning task where DP-GD can achieve superior generalization performance compared to GD in training two-layer Huberized ReLU convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we demonstrate that, under mild conditions, a small signal-to-noise ratio can result in GD producing training models with poor test accuracy, whereas DP-GD can yield training models with good test accuracy and privacy guarantees if the signal-to-noise ratio is not too small. This indicates that DP-GD has the potential to enhance model performance while ensuring privacy protection in certain learning tasks. Numerical simulations are further conducted to support our theoretical results.


Hierarchical Linkage Clustering Beyond Binary Trees and Ultrametrics

Dreveton, Maximilien, Grossglauser, Matthias, Kuroda, Daichi, Thiran, Patrick

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Hierarchical clustering seeks to uncover nested structures in data by constructing a tree of clusters, where deeper levels reveal finer-grained relationships. Traditional methods, including linkage approaches, face three major limitations: (i) they always return a hierarchy, even if none exists, (ii) they are restricted to binary trees, even if the true hierarchy is non-binary, and (iii) they are highly sensitive to the choice of linkage function. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing the notion of a valid hierarchy and defining a partial order over the set of valid hierarchies. We prove the existence of a finest valid hierarchy, that is, the hierarchy that encodes the maximum information consistent with the similarity structure of the data set. In particular, the finest valid hierarchy is not constrained to binary structures and, when no hierarchical relationships exist, collapses to a star tree. We propose a simple two-step algorithm that first constructs a binary tree via a linkage method and then prunes it to enforce validity. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions on the linkage function under which this procedure exactly recovers the finest valid hierarchy, and we show that all linkage functions satisfying these conditions yield the same hierarchy after pruning. Notably, classical linkage rules such as single, complete, and average satisfy these conditions, whereas Ward's linkage fails to do so.




Efficient Bayesian network structure learning via local Markov boundary search

Neural Information Processing Systems

This is then applied to learn the entire graph under a novel identifiability condition that generalizes existing conditions from the literature. As a matter of independent interest, we establish finite-sample guarantees for the problem of recovering Markov boundaries from data.