Harnessing large-language models to generate private synthetic text

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kurakin, Alexey, Ponomareva, Natalia, Syed, Umar, MacDermed, Liam, Terzis, Andreas
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Kurakin, Alexey
Ponomareva, Natalia
Syed, Umar
MacDermed, Liam
Terzis, Andreas
author_facet Kurakin, Alexey
Ponomareva, Natalia
Syed, Umar
MacDermed, Liam
Terzis, Andreas
contents Differentially private training algorithms like DP-SGD protect sensitive training data by ensuring that trained models do not reveal private information. An alternative approach, which this paper studies, is to use a sensitive dataset to generate synthetic data that is differentially private with respect to the original data, and then non-privately training a model on the synthetic data. Doing so has several advantages: synthetic data can be reused for other tasks (including for hyper parameter tuning), retained indefinitely, and shared with third parties without sacrificing privacy. However, generating private synthetic data is much harder than training a private model. To improve performance on text data, recent work has utilized public data by starting with a pre-trained generative language model and privately fine-tuning it on sensitive data. This model can be used to sample a DP synthetic dataset. While this strategy seems straightforward, executing it has proven problematic. Previous approaches either show significant performance loss, or have, as we show, critical design flaws. In this paper we demonstrate that a proper training objective along with tuning fewer parameters results in excellent DP synthetic data quality. Our approach is competitive with direct DP-training of downstream classifiers in terms of performance on downstream tasks. Further, we demonstrate that our DP synthetic data is not only useful for downstream classifier training, but also to tune those same models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_01684
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Harnessing large-language models to generate private synthetic text
Kurakin, Alexey
Ponomareva, Natalia
Syed, Umar
MacDermed, Liam
Terzis, Andreas
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Differentially private training algorithms like DP-SGD protect sensitive training data by ensuring that trained models do not reveal private information. An alternative approach, which this paper studies, is to use a sensitive dataset to generate synthetic data that is differentially private with respect to the original data, and then non-privately training a model on the synthetic data. Doing so has several advantages: synthetic data can be reused for other tasks (including for hyper parameter tuning), retained indefinitely, and shared with third parties without sacrificing privacy. However, generating private synthetic data is much harder than training a private model. To improve performance on text data, recent work has utilized public data by starting with a pre-trained generative language model and privately fine-tuning it on sensitive data. This model can be used to sample a DP synthetic dataset. While this strategy seems straightforward, executing it has proven problematic. Previous approaches either show significant performance loss, or have, as we show, critical design flaws. In this paper we demonstrate that a proper training objective along with tuning fewer parameters results in excellent DP synthetic data quality. Our approach is competitive with direct DP-training of downstream classifiers in terms of performance on downstream tasks. Further, we demonstrate that our DP synthetic data is not only useful for downstream classifier training, but also to tune those same models.
title Harnessing large-language models to generate private synthetic text
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01684