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Being able to efficiently and accurately select the top-$k$ elements with differential privacy is an integral component of various private data analysis tasks. In this paper, we present the oneshot Laplace mechanism, which generalizes the well-known Report Noisy Max mechanism to reporting noisy top-$k$ elements. We show that the oneshot Laplace mechanism with a noise level of $widetilde{O}(sqrt{k}/eps)$ is approximately differentially private. Compared to the previous peeling approach of running Report Noisy Max $k$ times, the oneshot Laplace mechanism only adds noises and computes the top $k$ elements once, hence much more efficient for large $k$. In addition, our proof of privacy relies on a novel coupling technique that bypasses the use of composition theorems. Finally, we present a novel application of efficient top-$k$ selection in the classical problem of ranking from pairwise comparisons.
Neural architecture search, which aims to automatically search for architectures (e.g., convolution, max pooling) of neural networks that maximize validation performance, has achieved remarkable progress recently. In many application scenarios, several parties would like to collaboratively search for a shared neural architecture by leveraging data from all parties. However, due to privacy concerns, no party wants its data to be seen by other parties. To address this problem, we propose federated neural architecture search (FNAS), where different parties collectively search for a differentiable architecture by exchanging gradients of architecture variables without exposing their data to other parties. To further preserve privacy, we study differentially-private FNAS (DP-FNAS), which adds random noise to the gradients of architecture variables. We provide theoretical guarantees of DP-FNAS in achieving differential privacy. Experiments show that DP-FNAS can search highly-performant neural architectures while protecting the privacy of individual parties. The code is available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/DP-FNAS
Deep Neural Networks, despite their great success in diverse domains, are provably sensitive to small perturbations on correctly classified examples and lead to erroneous predictions. Recently, it was proposed that this behavior can be combatted by optimizing the worst case loss function over all possible substitutions of training examples. However, this can be prone to weighing unlikely substitutions higher, limiting the accuracy gain. In this paper, we study adversarial robustness through randomized perturbations, which has two immediate advantages: (1) by ensuring that substitution likelihood is weighted by the proximity to the original word, we circumvent optimizing the worst case guarantees and achieve performance gains; and (2) the calibrated randomness imparts differentially-private model training, which additionally improves robustness against adversarial attacks on the model outputs. Our approach uses a novel density-based mechanism based on truncated Gumbel noise, which ensures training on substitutions of both rare and dense words in the vocabulary while maintaining semantic similarity for model robustness.
Common datasets have the form of elements with keys (e.g., transactions and products) and the goal is to perform analytics on the aggregated form of key and frequency pairs. A weighted sample of keys by (a function of) frequency is a highly versatile summary that provides a sparse set of representative keys and supports approximate evaluations of query statistics. We propose private weighted sampling (PWS): A method that ensures element-level differential privacy while retaining, to the extent possible, the utility of a respective non-private weighted sample. PWS maximizes the reporting probabilities of keys and estimation quality of a broad family of statistics. PWS improves over the state of the art also for the well-studied special case of private histograms, when no sampling is performed. We empirically demonstrate significant performance gains compared with prior baselines: 20%-300% increase in key reporting for common Zipfian frequency distributions and accuracy for $times 2$-$ 8$ lower frequencies in estimation tasks. Moreover, PWS is applied as a simple post-processing of a non-private sample, without requiring the original data. This allows for seamless integration with existing implementations of non-private schemes and retaining the efficiency of schemes designed for resource-constrained settings such as massive distributed or streamed data. We believe that due to practicality and performance, PWS may become a method of choice in applications where privacy is desired.
Correlation clustering is a widely used technique in unsupervised machine learning. Motivated by applications where individual privacy is a concern, we initiate the study of differentially private correlation clustering. We propose an algorithm that achieves subquadratic additive error compared to the optimal cost. In contrast, straightforward adaptations of existing non-private algorithms all lead to a trivial quadratic error. Finally, we give a lower bound showing that any pure differentially private algorithm for correlation clustering requires additive error of $Omega(n)$.
Generalized linear models (GLMs) such as logistic regression are among the most widely used arms in data analysts repertoire and often used on sensitive datasets. A large body of prior works that investigate GLMs under differential privacy (DP) constraints provide only private point estimates of the regression coefficients, and are not able to quantify parameter uncertainty. In this work, with logistic and Poisson regression as running examples, we introduce a generic noise-aware DP Bayesian inference method for a GLM at hand, given a noisy sum of summary statistics. Quantifying uncertainty allows us to determine which of the regression coefficients are statistically significantly different from zero. We provide a previously unknown tight privacy analysis and experimentally demonstrate that the posteriors obtained from our model, while adhering to strong privacy guarantees, are close to the non-private posteriors.