arXiv:2507.15836cs.LGcs.CR2025-07

用元梯度优化方法改进隐私审计中的特制样本,显著提升审计精度。

Optimizing Canaries for Privacy Auditing with Metagradient Descent

  • 利用元梯度优化生成更有效的隐私审计特制样本
  • 在图像分类任务中使隐私参数下界提升超2倍
  • 优化样本可迁移至大模型,且计算高效

本文研究黑箱隐私审计,目标是仅通过差分隐私学习算法的输出(即最终训练模型)来下界估计其隐私参数。对于最成功的差分隐私深度学习训练方法DP-SGD,经典审计方法依赖成员推断:审计者准备一组特殊“密探”样本,随机插入训练集后,尝试判断哪些密探被包含其中(通常通过成员推断攻击实现)。审计成功率即提供学习算法隐私参数的下界。本文主要贡献是提出一种优化审计密探集合的方法,利用元梯度优化技术。实验表明,使用此类优化后的密探,可在某些情况下将差分隐私图像分类模型的实证隐私参数下界提高超过2倍。此外,我们证明该方法具备可迁移性与高效性:为非私有SGD及小模型架构优化的密探,在审计更大规模的DP-SGD模型时仍保持有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

In this work we study black-box privacy auditing, where the goal is to lower bound the privacy parameter of a differentially private learning algorithm using only the algorithm's outputs (i.e., final trained model). For DP-SGD (the most successful method for training differentially private deep learning models), the canonical approach auditing uses membership inference-an auditor comes with a small set of special "canary" examples, inserts a random subset of them into the training set, and then tries to discern which of their canaries were included in the training set (typically via a membership inference attack). The auditor's success rate then provides a lower bound on the privacy parameters of the learning algorithm. Our main contribution is a method for optimizing the auditor's canary set to improve privacy auditing, leveraging recent work on metagradient optimization. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that by using such optimized canaries, we can improve empirical lower bounds for differentially private image classification models by over 2x in certain instances. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method is transferable and efficient: canaries optimized for non-private SGD with a small model architecture remain effective when auditing larger models trained with DP-SGD.

隐私审计差分隐私元学习成员推断

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