Revisiting Privacy Amplification by Subsampling in Selective Release DPSGD

Abstract

Machine learning's reliance on sensitive data necessitates privacy-preserving techniques like Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD). However, DPSGD suffers from substantial utility degradation and slow convergence due to gradient clipping and noise injection. Prior works have attempted to improve DPSGD from various perspectives; notably, the Differentially Private Selective Update and Release (DPSUR) algorithm has achieved remarkable model utility. However, the privacy accounting in DPSUR overlooks the variation in sampling probability introduced by the selective release mechanism, which compromises the rigor of its privacy guarantees. To address these limitations, we re-evaluate the privacy analysis of the selective release mechanism and propose a novel algorithm: Differentially Private Selective Release based on Clipped Gradients (DPSR-CG). Through a rigorous, newly derived privacy analysis and extensive experiments on multiple datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, IMDB, and FMNIST), we demonstrate that our DPSR-CG mechanism maintains strict privacy guarantees while achieving exceptional model performance.