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DP-{\lambda}CGD: Efficient Noise Correlation for Differentially Private Model Training

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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.

Nikita P. Kalinin, Ryan McKenna, Rasmus Pagh, Christoph H. Lampert• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Sentiment AnalysisIMDB (test)
Accuracy91.05
306
Matrix Factorization UtilityBalls-in-Bins accountant n=2048, k=8
RMSE7.24
63
Differentially Private Model TrainingDP Noise Correlation Utility
RMSE (eps=8, w/o Amp)12.73
25
Sentiment AnalysisIMDb BERT-base (test)
Mean Accuracy (ε=0.5)87.72
8
Image ClassificationCIFAR-10 (test)
Accuracy (eps=0.5)49.05
8
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