Differentially Private Relational Learning with Entity-level Privacy Guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Huang, Yinan, Yin, Haoteng, Chien, Eli, Wei, Rongzhe, Li, Pan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866911416906153984
author Huang, Yinan
Yin, Haoteng
Chien, Eli
Wei, Rongzhe
Li, Pan
author_facet Huang, Yinan
Yin, Haoteng
Chien, Eli
Wei, Rongzhe
Li, Pan
contents Learning with relational and network-structured data is increasingly vital in sensitive domains where protecting the privacy of individual entities is paramount. Differential Privacy (DP) offers a principled approach for quantifying privacy risks, with DP-SGD emerging as a standard mechanism for private model training. However, directly applying DP-SGD to relational learning is challenging due to two key factors: (i) entities often participate in multiple relations, resulting in high and difficult-to-control sensitivity; and (ii) relational learning typically involves multi-stage, potentially coupled (interdependent) sampling procedures that make standard privacy amplification analyses inapplicable. This work presents a principled framework for relational learning with formal entity-level DP guarantees. We provide a rigorous sensitivity analysis and introduce an adaptive gradient clipping scheme that modulates clipping thresholds based on entity occurrence frequency. We also extend the privacy amplification results to a tractable subclass of coupled sampling, where the dependence arises only through sample sizes. These contributions lead to a tailored DP-SGD variant for relational data with provable privacy guarantees. Experiments on fine-tuning text encoders over text-attributed network-structured relational data demonstrate the strong utility-privacy trade-offs of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/Graph-COM/Node_DP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08347
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differentially Private Relational Learning with Entity-level Privacy Guarantees
Huang, Yinan
Yin, Haoteng
Chien, Eli
Wei, Rongzhe
Li, Pan
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Learning with relational and network-structured data is increasingly vital in sensitive domains where protecting the privacy of individual entities is paramount. Differential Privacy (DP) offers a principled approach for quantifying privacy risks, with DP-SGD emerging as a standard mechanism for private model training. However, directly applying DP-SGD to relational learning is challenging due to two key factors: (i) entities often participate in multiple relations, resulting in high and difficult-to-control sensitivity; and (ii) relational learning typically involves multi-stage, potentially coupled (interdependent) sampling procedures that make standard privacy amplification analyses inapplicable. This work presents a principled framework for relational learning with formal entity-level DP guarantees. We provide a rigorous sensitivity analysis and introduce an adaptive gradient clipping scheme that modulates clipping thresholds based on entity occurrence frequency. We also extend the privacy amplification results to a tractable subclass of coupled sampling, where the dependence arises only through sample sizes. These contributions lead to a tailored DP-SGD variant for relational data with provable privacy guarantees. Experiments on fine-tuning text encoders over text-attributed network-structured relational data demonstrate the strong utility-privacy trade-offs of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/Graph-COM/Node_DP.
title Differentially Private Relational Learning with Entity-level Privacy Guarantees
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08347