Towards hyperparameter-free optimization with differential privacy
Keywords: Differential privacy, optimization, hyper-parameter tuning
TL;DR: We introduce a hyperparameter-free differential privacy training method that automatically adjusts the learning rate, reducing the need for extra tuning efforts in a privatized, efficient, and scalable manner for language and vision tasks.
Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) is a privacy-preserving paradigm that protects the training data when training deep learning models. Critically, the performance of models is determined by the training hyperparameters, especially those of the learning rate schedule, thus requiring fine-grained hyperparameter tuning on the data. In practice, it is common to tune the learning rate hyperparameters through the grid search that (1) is computationally expensive as multiple runs are needed, and (2) increases the risk of data leakage as the selection of hyperparameters is data-dependent. In this work, we adapt the automatic learning rate schedule to DP optimization for any models and optimizers, so as to significantly mitigate or even eliminate the cost of hyperparameter tuning when applied together with automatic per-sample gradient clipping. Our hyperparamter-free DP optimization is almost as computationally efficient as the standard non-DP optimization, and achieves state-of-the-art DP performance on various language and vision tasks.
Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
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Submission Number: 8016
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