Per-example gradient clipping is a key algorithmic step that enables practical differential private (DP) training for deep learning models. The choice of clipping threshold $R$, however, is vital for achieving high accuracy under DP. We propose an easy-to-use replacement, called automatic clipping, that eliminates the need to tune $R$ for any DP optimizers, including DP-SGD, DP-Adam, DP-LAMB and many others.The automatic variants are as private and computationally efficient as existing DP optimizers, but require no DP-specific hyperparameters and thus make DP training as amenable as the standard non-private training. We give a rigorous convergence analysis of automatic DP-SGD in the non-convex setting, showing that it can enjoy an asymptotic convergence rate that matches the standard SGD, under a symmetric gradient noise assumption of the per-sample gradients (commonly used in the non-DP literature). We demonstrate on various language and vision tasks that automatic clipping outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art, and can be easily employed with minimal changes to existing codebases.

Per-example gradient clipping is a key algorithmic step that enables practical differential private (DP) training for deep learning models. The choice of clipping threshold R, however, is vital for achieving high accuracy under DP. We propose an easy-to-use replacement, called automatic clipping, that eliminates the need to tune R for any DP optimizers, including DP-SGD, DP-Adam, DP-LAMB and many others.The automatic variants are as private and computationally efficient as existing DP optimizers, but require no DP-specific hyperparameters and thus make DP training as amenable as the standard non-private training. We give a rigorous convergence analysis of automatic DP-SGD in the non-convex setting, showing that it can enjoy an asymptotic convergence rate that matches the standard SGD, under a symmetric gradient noise assumption of the per-sample gradients (commonly used in the non-DP literature). We demonstrate on various language and vision tasks that automatic clipping outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art, and can be easily employed with minimal changes to existing codebases.

Deep learning techniques have achieved remarkable performance in wide-ranging tasks. However, when trained on privacy-sensitive datasets, the model parameters may expose private information in training data. Prior attempts for differentially private training, although offering rigorous privacy guarantees, lead to much lower model performance than the non-private ones. Besides, different runs of the same training algorithm produce models with large performance variance. To address these issues, we propose DPlis--Differentially Private Learning wIth Smoothing. The core idea of DPlis is to construct a smooth loss function that favors noise-resilient models lying in large flat regions of the loss landscape. We provide theoretical justification for the utility improvements of DPlis. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that DPlis can effectively boost model quality and training stability under a given privacy budget.

Standard methods for differentially private training of deep neural networks replace back-propagated mini-batch gradients with biased and noisy approximations to the gradient. These modifications to training often result in a privacy-preserving model that is significantly less accurate than its non-private counterpart. We hypothesize that alternative training algorithms may be more amenable to differential privacy. Specifically, we examine the suitability of direct feedback alignment (DFA). We propose the first differentially private method for training deep neural networks with DFA and show that it achieves significant gains in accuracy (often by 10-20%) compared to backprop-based differentially private training on a variety of architectures (fully connected, convolutional) and datasets.

Ensuring the privacy of sensitive data used to train modern machine learning models is of paramount importance in many areas of practice. One approach to study these concerns is through the lens of differential privacy. In this framework, privacy guarantees are generally obtained by perturbing models in such a way that specifics of data used to train the model are made ambiguous. A particular instance of this approach is through a "teacher-student" framework, wherein the teacher, who owns the sensitive data, provides the student with useful, but noisy, information, hopefully allowing the student model to perform well on a given task without access to particular features of the sensitive data. Because stronger privacy guarantees generally involve more significant perturbation on the part of the teacher, deploying existing frameworks fundamentally involves a trade-off between student's performance and privacy guarantee. One of the most important techniques used in previous works involves an ensemble of teacher models, which return information to a student based on a noisy voting procedure. In this work, we propose a novel voting mechanism with smooth sensitivity, which we call Immutable Noisy ArgMax, that, under certain conditions, can bear very large random noising from the teacher without affecting the useful information transferred to the student. Compared with previous work, our approach improves over the state-of-the-art methods on all measures, and scale to larger tasks with both better performance and stronger privacy ($\epsilon \approx 0$). This new proposed framework can be applied with any machine learning models, and provides an appealing solution for tasks that requires training on a large amount of data.