In plain words: Many separate models each learn from a different slice of private data, then stay hidden while a student trains on their noisy votes, so no single person's records shape the answer. It gave the best accuracy for a given privacy level on two image tasks.
Abstract · Semi-supervised Knowledge Transfer for Deep Learning from Private Training Data
Some machine learning applications involve training data that is sensitive, such as the medical histories of patients in a clinical trial. A model may inadvertently and implicitly store some of its training data; careful analysis of the model may therefore reveal sensitive information. To address this problem, we demonstrate a generally applicable approach to providing strong privacy guarantees for training data: Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE). The approach combines, in a black-box fashion, multiple models trained with disjoint datasets, such as records from different subsets of users. Because they rely directly on sensitive data, these models are not published, but instead used as "teachers" for a "student" model. The student learns to predict an output chosen by noisy voting among all of the teachers, and cannot directly access an individual teacher or the underlying data or parameters. The student's privacy properties can be understood both intuitively (since no single teacher and thus no single dataset dictates the student's training) and formally, in terms of differential privacy. These properties hold even if an adversary can not only query the student but also inspect its internal workings. Compared with previous work, the approach imposes only weak assumptions on how teachers are trained: it applies to any model, including non-convex models like DNNs. We achieve state-of-the-art privacy/utility trade-offs on MNIST and SVHN thanks to an improved privacy analysis and semi-supervised learning.
Nicolas Papernot, Martín Abadi, Úlfar Erlingsson, Ian Goodfellow, Kunal Talwar
arXiv:1610.05755 · stat.ML, cs.CR, cs.LG · submitted Oct 18, 2016 · updated Mar 3, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ICLR 17 as an oral
In the end, I could see this being useful for protecting private corporate data where the concern is that the company does not want to lose the perceived value of their datasets just because they have released an external model using internal data. Theoretical guarantees that most data will be private should be good enough for this case. On the other hand, I would worry about using it on truly sensitive data (such as medical records) where even one compromised datum is of high concern.