Privacy Odometers and Filters: Pay-as-you-Go Composition

Authors: Ryan M. Rogers, Aaron Roth, Jonathan Ullman, Salil Vadhan

NeurIPS 2016 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Theoretical In this paper we initiate the study of adaptive composition in differential privacy when the length of the composition, and the privacy parameters themselves can be chosen adaptively, as a function of the outcome of previously run analyses. We proceed by defining two objects which cover the two main use cases of composition theorems. A privacy filter is a stopping time rule that allows an analyst to halt a computation before his pre-specified privacy budget is exceeded. A privacy odometer allows the analyst to track realized privacy loss as he goes, without needing to pre-specify a privacy budget. We show that there exist privacy filters with bounds comparable (up to constants) with existing privacy composition theorems. We also give a privacy odometer that nearly matches non-adaptive private composition theorems, but is sometimes worse by a small asymptotic factor. Moreover, we show that this is inherent, and that any valid privacy odometer in the adaptive parameter setting must lose this factor, which shows a formal separation between the filter and odometer use-cases.
Researcher Affiliation Academia Department of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, University of Pennsylvania. ryrogers@sas.upenn.edu. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Pennsylvania. aaroth@cis.upenn.edu. Supported in part by an NSF CAREER award, NSF grant CNS-1513694, and a grant from the Sloan Foundation. College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University. jullman@ccs.neu.edu Center for Research on Computation & Society and John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University. salil@seas.harvard.edu.
Pseudocode Yes Algorithm 1 Fixed Param Comp(A, E = (E1, , Ek), b), where A is a randomized algorithm, E1, , Ek are classes of randomized algorithms, and b {0, 1}. Algorithm 2 Adapt Param Comp(A, k, b)
Open Source Code No The paper does not provide any concrete access information (specific repository link, explicit code release statement, or code in supplementary materials) for the methodology described in this paper.
Open Datasets No The paper does not provide concrete access information (specific link, DOI, repository name, formal citation with authors/year, or reference to established benchmark datasets) for a publicly available or open dataset.
Dataset Splits No The paper does not provide specific dataset split information (exact percentages, sample counts, citations to predefined splits, or detailed splitting methodology) needed to reproduce the data partitioning.
Hardware Specification No The paper does not provide specific hardware details (exact GPU/CPU models, processor types with speeds, memory amounts, or detailed computer specifications) used for running its experiments.
Software Dependencies No The paper does not provide specific ancillary software details (e.g., library or solver names with version numbers like Python 3.8, CPLEX 12.4) needed to replicate the experiment.
Experiment Setup No The paper does not contain specific experimental setup details (concrete hyperparameter values, training configurations, or system-level settings) in the main text.