On the Fairness of Privacy Protection: Measuring and Mitigating the Disparity of Group Privacy Risks for Differentially Private Machine Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Zhi, Huang, Changwu, Tang, Ke, Yao, Xin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yang, Zhi
Huang, Changwu
Tang, Ke
Yao, Xin
author_facet Yang, Zhi
Huang, Changwu
Tang, Ke
Yao, Xin
contents While significant progress has been made in conventional fairness-aware machine learning (ML) and differentially private ML (DPML), the fairness of privacy protection across groups remains underexplored. Existing studies have proposed methods to assess group privacy risks, but these are based on the average-case privacy risks of data records. Such approaches may underestimate the group privacy risks, thereby potentially underestimating the disparity across group privacy risks. Moreover, the current method for assessing the worst-case privacy risks of data records is time-consuming, limiting their practical applicability. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel membership inference game that can efficiently audit the approximate worst-case privacy risks of data records. Experimental results demonstrate that our method provides a more stringent measurement of group privacy risks, yielding a reliable assessment of the disparity in group privacy risks. Furthermore, to promote privacy protection fairness in DPML, we enhance the standard DP-SGD algorithm with an adaptive group-specific gradient clipping strategy, inspired by the design of canaries in differential privacy auditing studies. Extensive experiments confirm that our algorithm effectively reduces the disparity in group privacy risks, thereby enhancing the fairness of privacy protection in DPML.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_09114
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Fairness of Privacy Protection: Measuring and Mitigating the Disparity of Group Privacy Risks for Differentially Private Machine Learning
Yang, Zhi
Huang, Changwu
Tang, Ke
Yao, Xin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
While significant progress has been made in conventional fairness-aware machine learning (ML) and differentially private ML (DPML), the fairness of privacy protection across groups remains underexplored. Existing studies have proposed methods to assess group privacy risks, but these are based on the average-case privacy risks of data records. Such approaches may underestimate the group privacy risks, thereby potentially underestimating the disparity across group privacy risks. Moreover, the current method for assessing the worst-case privacy risks of data records is time-consuming, limiting their practical applicability. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel membership inference game that can efficiently audit the approximate worst-case privacy risks of data records. Experimental results demonstrate that our method provides a more stringent measurement of group privacy risks, yielding a reliable assessment of the disparity in group privacy risks. Furthermore, to promote privacy protection fairness in DPML, we enhance the standard DP-SGD algorithm with an adaptive group-specific gradient clipping strategy, inspired by the design of canaries in differential privacy auditing studies. Extensive experiments confirm that our algorithm effectively reduces the disparity in group privacy risks, thereby enhancing the fairness of privacy protection in DPML.
title On the Fairness of Privacy Protection: Measuring and Mitigating the Disparity of Group Privacy Risks for Differentially Private Machine Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09114