Fine-Tuning Language Models with Differential Privacy through Adaptive Noise Allocation

Xianzhi Li, Ran Zmigrod, Zhiqiang Ma, Xiaomo Liu, Xiaodan Zhu


Abstract
Language models are capable of memorizing detailed patterns and information, leading to a double-edged effect: they achieve impressive modeling performance on downstream tasks with the stored knowledge but also raise significant privacy concerns. Traditional differential privacy based training approaches offer robust safeguards by employing a uniform noise distribution across all parameters. However, this overlooks the distinct sensitivities and contributions of individual parameters in privacy protection and often results in suboptimal models. To address these limitations, we propose ANADP, a novel algorithm that adaptively allocates additive noise based on the importance of model parameters. We demonstrate that ANADP narrows the performance gap between regular fine-tuning and traditional DP fine-tuning on a series of datasets while maintaining the required privacy constraints.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.491
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8368–8375
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.491/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.491
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xianzhi Li, Ran Zmigrod, Zhiqiang Ma, Xiaomo Liu, and Xiaodan Zhu. 2024. Fine-Tuning Language Models with Differential Privacy through Adaptive Noise Allocation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 8368–8375, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fine-Tuning Language Models with Differential Privacy through Adaptive Noise Allocation (Li et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.491.pdf