Efficient Privacy-Preserving Stochastic Nonconvex Optimization

Lingxiao Wang, Bargav Jayaraman, David Evans, Quanquan Gu

Keywords: Differential Privacy, Nonconvex Optimization, Empirical Risk Minimization, Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning, Variance Reduction

TL;DR: Efficient private stochastic nonconvex optimization algorithm with improved utility guarantees

Abstract: While many solutions for privacy-preserving convex empirical risk minimization (ERM) have been developed, privacy-preserving nonconvex ERM remains a challenge. We study nonconvex ERM, which takes the form of minimizing a finite-sum of nonconvex loss functions over a training set. We propose a new differentially private stochastic gradient descent algorithm for nonconvex ERM that achieves strong privacy guarantees efficiently, and provide a tight analysis of its privacy and utility guarantees, as well as its gradient complexity. Our algorithm reduces gradient complexity while matching the best-known utility guarantee. Our experiments on benchmark nonconvex ERM problems demonstrate superior performance in terms of both training cost and utility gains compared with previous differentially private methods using the same privacy budgets.