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arXiv · 2412.16802

Balls-and-Bins Sampling for DP-SGD

Lynn Chua·Badih Ghazi·Charlie Harrison·Ethan Leeman·Pritish Kamath·Ravi Kumar·Pasin Manurangsi·Amer Sinha·Chiyuan Zhang
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Abstract

We introduce the Balls-and-Bins sampling for differentially private (DP) optimization methods such as DP-SGD. While it has been common practice to use some form of shuffling in DP-SGD implementations, privacy accounting algorithms have typically assumed that Poisson subsampling is used instead. Recent work by Chua et al. (ICML 2024), however, pointed out that shuffling based DP-SGD can have a much larger privacy cost in practical regimes of parameters. In this work we show that the Balls-and-Bins sampling achieves the "best-of-both" samplers, namely, the implementation of Balls-and-Bins sampling is similar to that of Shuffling and models trained using DP-SGD with Balls-and-Bins sampling achieve utility comparable to those trained using DP-SGD with Shuffling at the same noise multiplier, and yet, Balls-and-Bins sampling enjoys similar-or-better privacy amplification as compared to Poisson subsampling in practical regimes.

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Lynn Chua, Badih Ghazi, Charlie Harrison, Ethan Leeman, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Amer Sinha, Chiyuan Zhang. 2025-03-31. Balls-and-Bins Sampling for DP-SGD. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16802

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