In this paper, we study the stochastic linear bandit problem under the additional requirements of differential privacy, robustness and batched observations. In particular, we assume an adversary randomly chooses a constant fraction of the observed rewards in each batch, replacing them with arbitrary numbers. We present differentially private and robust variants of the arm elimination algorithm using logarithmic batch queries under two privacy models and provide regret bounds in both settings. In the first model, every reward in each round is reported by a potentially different client, which reduces to standard local differential privacy (LDP). In the second model, every action is "owned" by a different client, who may aggregate the rewards over multiple queries and privatize the aggregate response instead. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithms are the first simultaneously providing differential privacy and adversarial robustness in the stochastic linear bandits problem.
Given a collection of vectors $x^{(1)},\dots,x^{(n)} \in \{0,1\}^d$, the selection problem asks to report the index of an "approximately largest" entry in $x=\sum_{j=1}^n x^{(j)}$. Selection abstracts a host of problems--in machine learning it can be used for hyperparameter tuning, feature selection, or to model empirical risk minimization. We study selection under differential privacy, where a released index guarantees privacy for each vectors. Though selection can be solved with an excellent utility guarantee in the central model of differential privacy, the distributed setting lacks solutions. Specifically, strong privacy guarantees with high utility are offered in high trust settings, but not in low trust settings. For example, in the popular shuffle model of distributed differential privacy, there are strong lower bounds suggesting that the utility of the central model cannot be obtained. In this paper we design a protocol for differentially private selection in a trust setting similar to the shuffle model--with the crucial difference that our protocol tolerates corrupted servers while maintaining privacy. Our protocol uses techniques from secure multi-party computation (MPC) to implement a protocol that: (i) has utility on par with the best mechanisms in the central model, (ii) scales to large, distributed collections of high-dimensional vectors, and (iii) uses $k\geq 3$ servers that collaborate to compute the result, where the differential privacy holds assuming an honest majority. Since general-purpose MPC techniques are not sufficiently scalable, we propose a novel application of integer secret sharing, and evaluate the utility and efficiency of our protocol theoretically and empirically. Our protocol is the first to demonstrate that large-scale differentially private selection is possible in a distributed setting.
In this paper, we study a large-scale multi-agent minimax optimization problem, which models many interesting applications in statistical learning and game theory, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The overall objective is a sum of agents' private local objective functions. We first analyze an important special case, empirical minimax problem, where the overall objective approximates a true population minimax risk by statistical samples. We provide generalization bounds for learning with this objective through Rademacher complexity analysis. Then, we focus on the federated setting, where agents can perform local computation and communicate with a central server. Most existing federated minimax algorithms either require communication per iteration or lack performance guarantees with the exception of Local Stochastic Gradient Descent Ascent (SGDA), a multiple-local-update descent ascent algorithm which guarantees convergence under a diminishing stepsize. By analyzing Local SGDA under the ideal condition of no gradient noise, we show that generally it cannot guarantee exact convergence with constant stepsizes and thus suffers from slow rates of convergence. To tackle this issue, we propose FedGDA-GT, an improved Federated (Fed) Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) method based on Gradient Tracking (GT). When local objectives are Lipschitz smooth and strongly-convex-strongly-concave, we prove that FedGDA-GT converges linearly with a constant stepsize to global $\epsilon$-approximation solution with $\mathcal{O}(\log (1/\epsilon))$ rounds of communication, which matches the time complexity of centralized GDA method. Finally, we numerically show that FedGDA-GT outperforms Local SGDA.
Most prior results on differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) are derived under the simplistic assumption of uniform Lipschitzness, i.e., the per-sample gradients are uniformly bounded. We generalize uniform Lipschitzness by assuming that the per-sample gradients have sample-dependent upper bounds, i.e., per-sample Lipschitz constants, which themselves may be unbounded. We provide principled guidance on choosing the clip norm in DP-SGD for convex over-parameterized settings satisfying our general version of Lipschitzness when the per-sample Lipschitz constants are bounded; specifically, we recommend tuning the clip norm only till values up to the minimum per-sample Lipschitz constant. This finds application in the private training of a softmax layer on top of a deep network pre-trained on public data. We verify the efficacy of our recommendation via experiments on 8 datasets. Furthermore, we provide new convergence results for DP-SGD on convex and nonconvex functions when the Lipschitz constants are unbounded but have bounded moments, i.e., they are heavy-tailed.
In this paper paired comparison models with stochastic background are investigated. We focus on the models which allow three options for choice and the parameters are estimated by maximum likelihood method. The existence and uniqueness of the estimator is a key issue of the evaluation. In the case of two options, a necessary and sufficient condition is given by Ford in the Bradley-Terry model. We generalize this statement for the set of strictly log-concave distribution. Although in the case of three options necessary and sufficient condition is not known, there are two different sufficient conditions which are formulated in the literature. In this paper we generalize them, moreover we compare these conditions. Their capacities to indicate the existence of the maximum are analyzed by a large number of computer simulations. These simulations support that the new condition indicates the existence of the maximum much more frequently then the previously known ones,
Stochastic rounding (SR) offers an alternative to the deterministic IEEE-754 floating-point rounding modes. In some applications such as PDEs, ODEs and neural networks, SR empirically improves the numerical behavior and convergence to accurate solutions while no sound theoretical background has been provided. Recent works by Ipsen, Zhou, Higham, and Mary have computed SR probabilistic error bounds for basic linear algebra kernels. For example, the inner product SR probabilistic bound of the forward error is proportional to $\sqrt$ nu instead of nu for the default rounding mode. To compute the bounds, these works show that the errors accumulated in computation form a martingale. This paper proposes an alternative framework to characterize SR errors based on the computation of the variance. We pinpoint common error patterns in numerical algorithms and propose a lemma that bounds their variance. For each probability and through Bienaym{\'e}-Chebyshev inequality, this bound leads to better probabilistic error bound in several situations. Our method has the advantage of providing a tight probabilistic bound for all algorithms fitting our model. We show how the method can be applied to give SR error bounds for the inner product and Horner polynomial evaluation.
It is challenging to implement Kernel methods, if the data sources are distributed and cannot be joined at a trusted third party for privacy reasons. It is even more challenging, if the use case rules out privacy-preserving approaches that introduce noise. An example for such a use case is machine learning on clinical data. To realize exact privacy preserving computation of kernel methods, we propose FLAKE, a Federated Learning Approach for KErnel methods on horizontally distributed data. With FLAKE, the data sources mask their data so that a centralized instance can compute a Gram matrix without compromising privacy. The Gram matrix allows to calculate many kernel matrices, which can be used to train kernel-based machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machines. We prove that FLAKE prevents an adversary from learning the input data or the number of input features under a semi-honest threat model. Experiments on clinical and synthetic data confirm that FLAKE is outperforming the accuracy and efficiency of comparable methods. The time needed to mask the data and to compute the Gram matrix is several orders of magnitude less than the time a Support Vector Machine needs to be trained. Thus, FLAKE can be applied to many use cases.
Tuning the hyperparameters of differentially private (DP) machine learning (ML) algorithms often requires use of sensitive data and this may leak private information via hyperparameter values. Recently, Papernot and Steinke (2022) proposed a certain class of DP hyperparameter tuning algorithms, where the number of random search samples is randomized itself. Commonly, these algorithms still considerably increase the DP privacy parameter $\varepsilon$ over non-tuned DP ML model training and can be computationally heavy as evaluating each hyperparameter candidate requires a new training run. We focus on lowering both the DP bounds and the computational cost of these methods by using only a random subset of the sensitive data for the hyperparameter tuning and by extrapolating the optimal values to a larger dataset. We provide a R\'enyi differential privacy analysis for the proposed method and experimentally show that it consistently leads to better privacy-utility trade-off than the baseline method by Papernot and Steinke.
Machine learning models are increasingly used in high-stakes decision-making systems. In such applications, a major concern is that these models sometimes discriminate against certain demographic groups such as individuals with certain race, gender, or age. Another major concern in these applications is the violation of the privacy of users. While fair learning algorithms have been developed to mitigate discrimination issues, these algorithms can still leak sensitive information, such as individuals' health or financial records. Utilizing the notion of differential privacy (DP), prior works aimed at developing learning algorithms that are both private and fair. However, existing algorithms for DP fair learning are either not guaranteed to converge or require full batch of data in each iteration of the algorithm to converge. In this paper, we provide the first stochastic differentially private algorithm for fair learning that is guaranteed to converge. Here, the term "stochastic" refers to the fact that our proposed algorithm converges even when minibatches of data are used at each iteration (i.e. stochastic optimization). Our framework is flexible enough to permit different fairness notions, including demographic parity and equalized odds. In addition, our algorithm can be applied to non-binary classification tasks with multiple (non-binary) sensitive attributes. As a byproduct of our convergence analysis, we provide the first utility guarantee for a DP algorithm for solving nonconvex-strongly concave min-max problems. Our numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm consistently offers significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art baselines, and can be applied to larger scale problems with non-binary target/sensitive attributes.
Differential private optimization for nonconvex smooth objective is considered. In the previous work, the best known utility bound is $\widetilde O(\sqrt{d}/(n\varepsilon_\mathrm{DP}))$ in terms of the squared full gradient norm, which is achieved by Differential Private Gradient Descent (DP-GD) as an instance, where $n$ is the sample size, $d$ is the problem dimensionality and $\varepsilon_\mathrm{DP}$ is the differential privacy parameter. To improve the best known utility bound, we propose a new differential private optimization framework called \emph{DIFF2 (DIFFerential private optimization via gradient DIFFerences)} that constructs a differential private global gradient estimator with possibly quite small variance based on communicated \emph{gradient differences} rather than gradients themselves. It is shown that DIFF2 with a gradient descent subroutine achieves the utility of $\widetilde O(d^{2/3}/(n\varepsilon_\mathrm{DP})^{4/3})$, which can be significantly better than the previous one in terms of the dependence on the sample size $n$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fundamental result to improve the standard utility $\widetilde O(\sqrt{d}/(n\varepsilon_\mathrm{DP}))$ for nonconvex objectives. Additionally, a more computational and communication efficient subroutine is combined with DIFF2 and its theoretical analysis is also given. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the superiority of DIFF2 framework.
Stochastic approximation with multiple coupled sequences (MSA) has found broad applications in machine learning as it encompasses a rich class of problems including bilevel optimization (BLO), multi-level compositional optimization (MCO), and reinforcement learning (specifically, actor-critic methods). However, designing provably-efficient federated algorithms for MSA has been an elusive question even for the special case of double sequence approximation (DSA). Towards this goal, we develop FedMSA which is the first federated algorithm for MSA, and establish its near-optimal communication complexity. As core novelties, (i) FedMSA enables the provable estimation of hypergradients in BLO and MCO via local client updates, which has been a notable bottleneck in prior theory, and (ii) our convergence guarantees are sensitive to the heterogeneity-level of the problem. We also incorporate momentum and variance reduction techniques to achieve further acceleration leading to near-optimal rates. Finally, we provide experiments that support our theory and demonstrate the empirical benefits of FedMSA. As an example, FedMSA enables order-of-magnitude savings in communication rounds compared to prior federated BLO schemes.