Papers for

ml engineers training privacy-preserving models

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Privacy loss measures compared to reduce noise in data analysis

Unifying Privacy Accounting: Information Equivalence and Information Loss

Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) admits several notions, but the choice among them may affect both privacy analysis and utility. In this paper, we consider four mainstream curve-based privacy notions within a unified information-theoretic framework. For a fixed ordered pair of output distributions, we establish information equivalence among the two directional privacy profiles of $(\varepsilon,δ)$-DP, the pair of hypothesis-testing trade-off functions, and the extended privacy-loss distribution. The exact Rényi differential privacy (RDP) curve joins this equivalence class whenever it is finite at some order greater than one. Under this mild condition, choosing among these notions changes only their semantic interpretation and computational requirements. In contrast, taking the maximum of the directional privacy profiles or compressing the RDP curve into a single zero-concentrated differential privacy (zCDP) parameter can lose information. We quantify the information loss between the exact RDP curve and its zCDP bound for standard noise mechanisms. This gap is zero for Gaussian noise but generally positive for Gaussian-mixture, Laplace, discrete Gaussian, and Poisson-subsampled Gaussian mechanisms. Moreover, this gap grows linearly with the number of independently composed mechanisms. Our information-theoretic perspective has practical consequences. At the same certified privacy level, retaining the full RDP curve rather than using zCDP reduces the required noise variance by up to $45\%$ for Gaussian-mixture noise in workloads comparable in size to the American Community Survey. For DP-SGD on Fashion-MNIST under Poisson subsampling, an RDP-based privacy accountant improves test accuracy by up to $8.73$ percentage points compared to a zCDP-based accountant when both are calibrated to the same $(\varepsilon,δ)$ guarantee.

Thu 1 OctCryptography and SecurityInformation Theory
The gist
When computers share information while protecting privacy, they use methods that balance privacy and accuracy. The authors showed that several ways to measure this privacy loss are actually closely related and carry the same information. However, simplifying some privacy measures can lose important details, which means more noise (randomness) must be added to protect privacy. Their work shows that keeping the full detailed privacy measurement can reduce the amount of noise needed, improving the usefulness of data and machine learning results.
Open → 2610.02414v1