差分隐私随机梯度下降中隐私与效用权衡的根本局限性 / Fundamental Limitations of Favorable Privacy-Utility Guarantees for DP-SGD
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文通过理论分析证明,在最坏情况的攻击者模型下,广泛使用的差分隐私随机梯度下降算法(DP-SGD)存在一个根本性的瓶颈:它无法在保证强隐私保护的同时,获得高模型准确率,因为要达到有意义的隐私水平就必须添加足够大的噪声,而这会严重损害模型的实用性。
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) is the dominant paradigm for private training, but its fundamental limitations under worst-case adversarial privacy definitions remain poorly understood. We analyze DP-SGD in the $f$-differential privacy framework, which characterizes privacy via hypothesis-testing trade-off curves, and study shuffled sampling over a single epoch with $M$ gradient updates. We derive an explicit suboptimal upper bound on the achievable trade-off curve. This result induces a geometric lower bound on the separation $\kappa$ which is the maximum distance between the mechanism's trade-off curve and the ideal random-guessing line. Because a large separation implies significant adversarial advantage, meaningful privacy requires small $\kappa$. However, we prove that enforcing a small separation imposes a strict lower bound on the Gaussian noise multiplier $\sigma$, which directly limits the achievable utility. In particular, under the standard worst-case adversarial model, shuffled DP-SGD must satisfy $\sigma \ge \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\ln M}}$ $\quad\text{or}\quad$ $\kappa \ge\ \frac{1}{\sqrt{8}}\!\left(1-\frac{1}{\sqrt{4\pi\ln M}}\right)$, and thus cannot simultaneously achieve strong privacy and high utility. Although this bound vanishes asymptotically as $M \to \infty$, the convergence is extremely slow: even for practically relevant numbers of updates the required noise magnitude remains substantial. We further show that the same limitation extends to Poisson subsampling up to constant factors. Our experiments confirm that the noise levels implied by this bound leads to significant accuracy degradation at realistic training settings, thus showing a critical bottleneck in DP-SGD under standard worst-case adversarial assumptions.
差分隐私随机梯度下降中隐私与效用权衡的根本局限性 / Fundamental Limitations of Favorable Privacy-Utility Guarantees for DP-SGD
这篇论文通过理论分析证明,在最坏情况的攻击者模型下,广泛使用的差分隐私随机梯度下降算法(DP-SGD)存在一个根本性的瓶颈:它无法在保证强隐私保护的同时,获得高模型准确率,因为要达到有意义的隐私水平就必须添加足够大的噪声,而这会严重损害模型的实用性。
源自 arXiv: 2601.10237