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Main Authors: Huang, Tianhao, Yang, Tao, Habernal, Ivan, Hu, Lijie, Wang, Di
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08027
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author Huang, Tianhao
Yang, Tao
Habernal, Ivan
Hu, Lijie
Wang, Di
author_facet Huang, Tianhao
Yang, Tao
Habernal, Ivan
Hu, Lijie
Wang, Di
contents Deep learning models for NLP tasks are prone to variants of privacy attacks. To prevent privacy leakage, researchers have investigated word-level perturbations, relying on the formal guarantees of differential privacy (DP) in the embedding space. However, many existing approaches either achieve unsatisfactory performance in the high privacy regime when using the Laplacian or Gaussian mechanism, or resort to weaker relaxations of DP that are inferior to the canonical DP in terms of privacy strength. This raises the question of whether a new method for private word embedding can be designed to overcome these limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel private embedding method called the high dimensional truncated Laplacian mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a non-trivial extension of the truncated Laplacian mechanism, which was previously only investigated in one-dimensional space cases. Theoretically, we show that our method has a lower variance compared to the previous private word embedding methods. To further validate its effectiveness, we conduct comprehensive experiments on private embedding and downstream tasks using three datasets. Remarkably, even in the high privacy regime, our approach only incurs a slight decrease in utility compared to the non-private scenario.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_08027
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Private Language Models via Truncated Laplacian Mechanism
Huang, Tianhao
Yang, Tao
Habernal, Ivan
Hu, Lijie
Wang, Di
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Deep learning models for NLP tasks are prone to variants of privacy attacks. To prevent privacy leakage, researchers have investigated word-level perturbations, relying on the formal guarantees of differential privacy (DP) in the embedding space. However, many existing approaches either achieve unsatisfactory performance in the high privacy regime when using the Laplacian or Gaussian mechanism, or resort to weaker relaxations of DP that are inferior to the canonical DP in terms of privacy strength. This raises the question of whether a new method for private word embedding can be designed to overcome these limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel private embedding method called the high dimensional truncated Laplacian mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a non-trivial extension of the truncated Laplacian mechanism, which was previously only investigated in one-dimensional space cases. Theoretically, we show that our method has a lower variance compared to the previous private word embedding methods. To further validate its effectiveness, we conduct comprehensive experiments on private embedding and downstream tasks using three datasets. Remarkably, even in the high privacy regime, our approach only incurs a slight decrease in utility compared to the non-private scenario.
title Private Language Models via Truncated Laplacian Mechanism
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08027