Data-adaptive Differentially Private Prompt Synthesis for In-Context Learning

Fengyu Gao, Ruida Zhou, Tianhao Wang, Cong Shen, Jing Yang

Keywords: in-context learning, differential privacy, large language models

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on the contextual information embedded in examples/demonstrations to perform in-context learning (ICL). To mitigate the risk of LLMs potentially leaking private information contained in examples in the prompt, we introduce a novel data-adaptive differentially private algorithm called **AdaDPSyn** to generate synthetic examples from the private dataset and then use these synthetic examples to perform ICL. The objective of AdaDPSyn is to adaptively adjust the noise level in the data synthesis mechanism according to the inherent statistical properties of the data, thereby preserving high ICL accuracy while maintaining formal differential privacy guarantees. A key innovation in AdaDPSyn is the *Precision-Focused Iterative Radius Reduction* technique, which dynamically refines the aggregation radius - the scope of data grouping for noise addition - based on patterns observed in data clustering, thereby minimizing the amount of additive noise. We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and compare AdaDPSyn with DP few-shot generation algorithm (Tang et al., 2023). The experiments demonstrate that AdaDPSyn not only outperforms DP few-shot generation, but also maintains high accuracy levels close to those of non-private baselines, providing an effective solution for ICL with privacy protection.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 8448