DIFFERENTIALLY PRIVATE META-LEARNING

Jeffrey Li, Mikhail Khodak, Sebastian Caldas, Ameet Talwalkar

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

31 Scopus citations

Abstract

Parameter-transfer is a well-known and versatile approach for meta-learning, with applications including few-shot learning, federated learning, and reinforcement learning. However, parameter-transfer algorithms often require sharing models that have been trained on the samples from specific tasks, thus leaving the task-owners susceptible to breaches of privacy. We conduct the first formal study of privacy in this setting and formalize the notion of task-global differential privacy as a practical relaxation of more commonly studied threat models. We then propose a new differentially private algorithm for gradient-based parameter transfer that not only satisfies this privacy requirement but also retains provable transfer learning guarantees in convex settings. Empirically, we apply our analysis to the problems of federated learning with personalization and few-shot classification, showing that allowing the relaxation to task-global privacy from the more commonly studied notion of local privacy leads to dramatically increased performance in recurrent neural language modeling and image classification.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event8th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020 - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Duration: Apr 30 2020 → …

Conference

Conference8th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020
Country/TerritoryEthiopia
CityAddis Ababa
Period4/30/20 → …

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Education
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Computer Science Applications

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