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Differentially Private Dropout (arxiv.org)
3 points by heydenberk on Jan 4, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Dropout randomly switches off parts of a network during training to prevent overfitting; that same random noise can also hide individual training records. A tighter way of adding up privacy loss across many training steps kept the model accurate on standard test datasets.

Abstract

Large data collections required for the training of neural networks often contain sensitive information such as the medical histories of patients, and the privacy of the training data must be preserved. In this paper, we introduce a dropout technique that provides an elegant Bayesian interpretation to dropout, and show that the intrinsic noise added, with the primary goal of regularization, can be exploited to obtain a degree of differential privacy. The iterative nature of training neural networks presents a challenge for privacy-preserving estimation since multiple iterations increase the amount of noise added. We overcome this by using a relaxed notion of differential privacy, called concentrated differential privacy, which provides tighter estimates on the overall privacy loss. We demonstrate the accuracy of our privacy-preserving dropout algorithm on benchmark datasets.

Beyza Ermis, Ali Taylan Cemgil
arXiv:1712.01665 · stat.ML, cs.LG · submitted Nov 30, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1611.00340 by other authors

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