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Adaptive Private-K-Selection with Adaptive K and Application to Multi-label PATE
Proceedings of The 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR 151:5622-5635, 2022.
Abstract
We provide an end-to-end Renyi DP based-framework for differentially private top-k selection. Unlike previous approaches, which require a data-independent choice on k, we propose to privately release a data-dependent choice of k such that the gap between k-th and the (k+1)st “quality” is large. This is achieved by an extension of the Report-Noisy-Max algorithm with a more concentrated Gaussian noise. Not only does this eliminates one hyperparameter, the adaptive choice of k also certifies the stability of the top-k indices in the unordered set so we can release them using a combination of the propose-test-release (PTR) framework and the Distance-to-Stability mechanism. We show that our construction improves the privacy-utility trade-offs compared to the previous top-k selection algorithms theoretically and empirically. Additionally, we apply our algorithm to “Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE)” in multi-label classification tasks with a large number of labels and show that it leads to significant performance gains.