DP-GPL: Differentially Private Graph Prompt Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Jing, Boenisch, Franziska, Olatunji, Iyiola Emmanuel, Dziedzic, Adam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866917971109085184
author Xu, Jing
Boenisch, Franziska
Olatunji, Iyiola Emmanuel
Dziedzic, Adam
author_facet Xu, Jing
Boenisch, Franziska
Olatunji, Iyiola Emmanuel
Dziedzic, Adam
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable performance in various applications. Recently, graph prompt learning has emerged as a powerful GNN training paradigm, inspired by advances in language and vision foundation models. Here, a GNN is pre-trained on public data and then adapted to sensitive tasks using lightweight graph prompts. However, using prompts from sensitive data poses privacy risks. In this work, we are the first to investigate these practical risks in graph prompts by instantiating a membership inference attack that reveals significant privacy leakage. We also find that the standard privacy method, DP-SGD, fails to provide practical privacy-utility trade-offs in graph prompt learning, likely due to the small number of sensitive data points used to learn the prompts. As a solution, we propose DP-GPL for differentially private graph prompt learning based on the PATE framework, that generates a graph prompt with differential privacy guarantees. Our evaluation across various graph prompt learning methods, GNN architectures, and pre-training strategies demonstrates that our algorithm achieves high utility at strong privacy, effectively mitigating privacy concerns while preserving the powerful capabilities of prompted GNNs as powerful foundation models in the graph domain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10544
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DP-GPL: Differentially Private Graph Prompt Learning
Xu, Jing
Boenisch, Franziska
Olatunji, Iyiola Emmanuel
Dziedzic, Adam
Machine Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable performance in various applications. Recently, graph prompt learning has emerged as a powerful GNN training paradigm, inspired by advances in language and vision foundation models. Here, a GNN is pre-trained on public data and then adapted to sensitive tasks using lightweight graph prompts. However, using prompts from sensitive data poses privacy risks. In this work, we are the first to investigate these practical risks in graph prompts by instantiating a membership inference attack that reveals significant privacy leakage. We also find that the standard privacy method, DP-SGD, fails to provide practical privacy-utility trade-offs in graph prompt learning, likely due to the small number of sensitive data points used to learn the prompts. As a solution, we propose DP-GPL for differentially private graph prompt learning based on the PATE framework, that generates a graph prompt with differential privacy guarantees. Our evaluation across various graph prompt learning methods, GNN architectures, and pre-training strategies demonstrates that our algorithm achieves high utility at strong privacy, effectively mitigating privacy concerns while preserving the powerful capabilities of prompted GNNs as powerful foundation models in the graph domain.
title DP-GPL: Differentially Private Graph Prompt Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10544