DP-{\lambda}CGD: Efficient Noise Correlation for Differentially Private Model Training
About
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is the gold standard for training machine learning models with formal differential privacy guarantees. Several recent extensions improve its accuracy by introducing correlated noise across training iterations. Matrix factorization mechanisms are a prominent example, but they correlate noise across many iterations and require storing previously added noise vectors, leading to substantial memory overhead in some settings. In this work, we propose a new noise correlation strategy that correlates noise only with the immediately preceding iteration and cancels a controlled portion of it. Our method relies on noise regeneration using a pseudorandom noise generator, eliminating the need to store past noise. As a result, it requires no additional memory beyond standard DP-SGD. We show that the computational overhead is minimal and empirically demonstrate improved accuracy over DP-SGD.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentiment Analysis | IMDB (test) | Accuracy91.05 | 306 | |
| Matrix Factorization Utility | Balls-in-Bins accountant n=2048, k=8 | RMSE7.24 | 63 | |
| Differentially Private Model Training | DP Noise Correlation Utility | RMSE (eps=8, w/o Amp)12.73 | 25 | |
| Sentiment Analysis | IMDb BERT-base (test) | Mean Accuracy (ε=0.5)87.72 | 8 | |
| Image Classification | CIFAR-10 (test) | Accuracy (eps=0.5)49.05 | 8 |