Clip Body and Tail Separately: High Probability Guarantees for DPSGD with Heavy Tails

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sha, Haichao, Cao, Yang, Liu, Yong, Wu, Yuncheng, Liu, Ruixuan, Chen, Hong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866929361918099456
author Sha, Haichao
Cao, Yang
Liu, Yong
Wu, Yuncheng
Liu, Ruixuan
Chen, Hong
author_facet Sha, Haichao
Cao, Yang
Liu, Yong
Wu, Yuncheng
Liu, Ruixuan
Chen, Hong
contents Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely utilized to preserve training data privacy in deep learning, which first clips the gradients to a predefined norm and then injects calibrated noise into the training procedure. Existing DPSGD works typically assume the gradients follow sub-Gaussian distributions and design various clipping mechanisms to optimize training performance. However, recent studies have shown that the gradients in deep learning exhibit a heavy-tail phenomenon, that is, the tails of the gradient have infinite variance, which may lead to excessive clipping loss to the gradients with existing DPSGD mechanisms. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach, Discriminative Clipping~(DC)-DPSGD, with two key designs. First, we introduce a subspace identification technique to distinguish between body and tail gradients. Second, we present a discriminative clipping mechanism that applies different clipping thresholds for body and tail gradients to reduce the clipping loss. Under the non-convex condition, \ourtech{} reduces the empirical gradient norm from {${\mathbb{O}\left(\log^{\max(0,θ-1)}(T/δ)\log^{2θ}(\sqrt{T})\right)}$} to {${\mathbb{O}\left(\log(\sqrt{T})\right)}$} with heavy-tailed index $θ\geq 1/2$, iterations $T$, and arbitrary probability $δ$. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms three baselines by up to 9.72\% in terms of accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_17529
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Clip Body and Tail Separately: High Probability Guarantees for DPSGD with Heavy Tails
Sha, Haichao
Cao, Yang
Liu, Yong
Wu, Yuncheng
Liu, Ruixuan
Chen, Hong
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely utilized to preserve training data privacy in deep learning, which first clips the gradients to a predefined norm and then injects calibrated noise into the training procedure. Existing DPSGD works typically assume the gradients follow sub-Gaussian distributions and design various clipping mechanisms to optimize training performance. However, recent studies have shown that the gradients in deep learning exhibit a heavy-tail phenomenon, that is, the tails of the gradient have infinite variance, which may lead to excessive clipping loss to the gradients with existing DPSGD mechanisms. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach, Discriminative Clipping~(DC)-DPSGD, with two key designs. First, we introduce a subspace identification technique to distinguish between body and tail gradients. Second, we present a discriminative clipping mechanism that applies different clipping thresholds for body and tail gradients to reduce the clipping loss. Under the non-convex condition, \ourtech{} reduces the empirical gradient norm from {${\mathbb{O}\left(\log^{\max(0,θ-1)}(T/δ)\log^{2θ}(\sqrt{T})\right)}$} to {${\mathbb{O}\left(\log(\sqrt{T})\right)}$} with heavy-tailed index $θ\geq 1/2$, iterations $T$, and arbitrary probability $δ$. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms three baselines by up to 9.72\% in terms of accuracy.
title Clip Body and Tail Separately: High Probability Guarantees for DPSGD with Heavy Tails
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17529