English
Related papers

Related papers: PACZero: PAC-Private Fine-Tuning of Language Model…

200 papers

Training with differential privacy (DP) provides a guarantee to members in a dataset that they cannot be identified by users of the released model. However, those data providers, and, in general, the public, lack methods to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Zoë Ruha Bell , Anvith Thudi , Olive Franzese-McLaughlin , Nicolas Papernot , Shafi Goldwasser

We introduce the Poisson Binomial mechanism (PBM), a discrete differential privacy mechanism for distributed mean estimation (DME) with applications to federated learning and analytics. We provide a tight analysis of its privacy guarantees,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Wei-Ning Chen , Ayfer Özgür , Peter Kairouz

Private record linkage (PRL) is the problem of identifying pairs of records that are similar as per an input matching rule from databases held by two parties that do not trust one another. We identify three key desiderata that a PRL…

Databases · Computer Science 2017-09-04 Xi He , Ashwin Machanavajjhala , Cheryl Flynn , Divesh Srivastava

The pretraining and fine-tuning approach has become the leading technique for various NLP applications. However, recent studies reveal that fine-tuning data, due to their sensitive nature, domain-specific characteristics, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Qian Sun , Hanpeng Wu , Xi Sheryl Zhang

Previous work on user-level differential privacy (DP) [Ghazi et al. NeurIPS 2021, Bun et al. STOC 2023] obtained generic algorithms that work for various learning tasks. However, their focus was on the example-rich regime, where the users…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-09-25 Badih Ghazi , Pritish Kamath , Ravi Kumar , Pasin Manurangsi , Raghu Meka , Chiyuan Zhang

The Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) Privacy framework [46] provides a powerful instance-based methodology to preserve privacy in complex data-driven systems. Existing PAC Privacy algorithms (we call them Auto-PAC) rely on a Gaussian…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tao Zhang , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) for downstream tasks is a large-scale optimization problem, in which the choice of the training algorithm critically determines how well the trained model can generalize to unseen test data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Guangliang Liu , Zhiyu Xue , Xitong Zhang , Kristen Marie Johnson , Rongrong Wang

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained on sensitive user data, understanding the fundamental cost of privacy in language learning becomes essential. We initiate the study of differentially private (DP) language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Xiaoyu Li , Andi Han , Jiaojiao Jiang , Junbin Gao

We examine privacy-preserving inferences of group mean differences in zero-inflated right-skewed (zirs) data. Zero inflation and right skewness are typical characteristics of ads clicks and purchases data collected from e-commerce and…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-11 Fang Liu , Ruyu Zhou , Yiming Paul Li , James Honaker , Milan Shen

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) is a standard method for enforcing privacy in deep learning, typically using the Gaussian mechanism to perturb gradient updates. However, conventional mechanisms such as Gaussian…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Qin Yang , Nicholas Stout , Meisam Mohammady , Han Wang , Ayesha Samreen , Christopher J Quinn , Yan Yan , Ashish Kundu , Yuan Hong

We revisit the problem of differentially private release of classification queries. In this problem, the goal is to design an algorithm that can accurately answer a sequence of classification queries based on a private training set while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-05 Anupama Nandi , Raef Bassily

Language model alignment is crucial for ensuring that large language models (LLMs) align with human preferences, yet it often involves sensitive user data, raising significant privacy concerns. While prior work has integrated differential…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Keyu Chen , Hao Tang , Qinglin Liu , Yizhao Xu

Language Models (LLMs) are often quantized to lower precision to reduce the memory cost and latency in inference. However, quantization often degrades model performance, thus fine-tuning is required for various down-stream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Jiajun Zhou , Yifan Yang , Kai Zhen , Ziyue Liu , Yequan Zhao , Ershad Banijamali , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Ngai Wong , Zheng Zhang

We study the inherent trade-offs in minimizing privacy risks and maximizing utility, while maintaining high computational efficiency, when fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). A number of recent works in privacy research have attempted…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Soumi Das , Camila Kolling , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Mahsa Amani , Bishwamittra Ghosh , Qinyuan Wu , Till Speicher , Krishna P. Gummadi

Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked a plethora of powerful applications at the network edge, such as intelligent personal assistants. Data privacy and security concerns have prompted a shift towards edge-based fine-tuning of personal…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Shengyuan Ye , Bei Ouyang , Tianyi Qian , Liekang Zeng , Jingyi Li , Jiangsu Du , Xiaowen Chu , Guoliang Xing , Xu Chen

Learning an unknown $n$-qubit quantum state $\rho$ is a fundamental challenge in quantum computing. Information-theoretically, it is known that tomography requires exponential in $n$ many copies of $\rho$ to estimate it up to trace…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-02-16 Srinivasan Arunachalam , Yihui Quek , John Smolin

NLP models trained with differential privacy (DP) usually adopt the DP-SGD framework, and privacy guarantees are often reported in terms of the privacy budget $\epsilon$. However, $\epsilon$ does not have any intrinsic meaning, and it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Pedro Faustini , Natasha Fernandes , Annabelle McIver , Mark Dras

Fine-tuning is powerful for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, but it often results in huge memory usages. A promising approach to mitigate this is using Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, which estimates gradients to replace…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Fei Wang , Li Shen , Liang Ding , Chao Xue , Ye Liu , Changxing Ding

Numerous studies have highlighted the privacy risks associated with pretrained large language models. In contrast, our research offers a unique perspective by demonstrating that pretrained large language models can effectively contribute to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Saiteja Utpala , Sara Hooker , Pin Yu Chen

Automated masking of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is critical for privacy-preserving conversational systems. While current frontier large language models demonstrate strong PII masking capabilities, concerns about data handling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Prabigya Acharya , Liza Shrestha