SMA-DP: Spectral Memory-Aware Differential Privacy for Deep Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Partohaghighi, Mohammad, Marcia, Roummel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Partohaghighi, Mohammad
Marcia, Roummel
author_facet Partohaghighi, Mohammad
Marcia, Roummel
contents Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) enables private deep learning through per-example clipping and calibrated Gaussian noise, but its high-variance updates can reduce utility on challenging datasets. We propose \textbf{SMA-DP-SGD}, a \textbf{Spectral Memory-Aware Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent} method that augments DP-SGD with a fractional memory branch built only from previously privatized noisy releases. WeightWatcher-inspired power-law spectral exponents provide group-wise reliability signals, instantiated layer-wise in our experiments, to adapt the decay and effective memory depth. Private-history alignment, norm matching, and warm-up activation stabilize the memory contribution. Privacy remains transparent: conditioned on the private release history, the memory branch is fixed, and the only newly data-dependent term is the current clipped sum scaled by a fixed coefficient \(β\). Hence, SMA-DP-SGD preserves a clean conditional sensitivity structure and exactly recovers group-wise DP-SGD when \(β=1\). Experiments on CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, and MNIST show competitive or superior accuracy over several DP optimization baselines, with the largest gains on CIFAR-100 and CIFAR-10. CIFAR-10 ablations show that \(β\) controls the privacy--utility trajectory, while spectral and memory diagnostics confirm a controlled short-to-moderate effective memory depth and a small memory-branch ratio. Runtime analysis shows that the mechanism incurs additional overhead, about \(2.94\times\) DP-SGD in our CIFAR-10 implementation, revealing a practical trade-off between adaptive private memory and computational cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_20450
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SMA-DP: Spectral Memory-Aware Differential Privacy for Deep Learning
Partohaghighi, Mohammad
Marcia, Roummel
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) enables private deep learning through per-example clipping and calibrated Gaussian noise, but its high-variance updates can reduce utility on challenging datasets. We propose \textbf{SMA-DP-SGD}, a \textbf{Spectral Memory-Aware Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent} method that augments DP-SGD with a fractional memory branch built only from previously privatized noisy releases. WeightWatcher-inspired power-law spectral exponents provide group-wise reliability signals, instantiated layer-wise in our experiments, to adapt the decay and effective memory depth. Private-history alignment, norm matching, and warm-up activation stabilize the memory contribution. Privacy remains transparent: conditioned on the private release history, the memory branch is fixed, and the only newly data-dependent term is the current clipped sum scaled by a fixed coefficient \(β\). Hence, SMA-DP-SGD preserves a clean conditional sensitivity structure and exactly recovers group-wise DP-SGD when \(β=1\). Experiments on CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, and MNIST show competitive or superior accuracy over several DP optimization baselines, with the largest gains on CIFAR-100 and CIFAR-10. CIFAR-10 ablations show that \(β\) controls the privacy--utility trajectory, while spectral and memory diagnostics confirm a controlled short-to-moderate effective memory depth and a small memory-branch ratio. Runtime analysis shows that the mechanism incurs additional overhead, about \(2.94\times\) DP-SGD in our CIFAR-10 implementation, revealing a practical trade-off between adaptive private memory and computational cost.
title SMA-DP: Spectral Memory-Aware Differential Privacy for Deep Learning
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20450