Harnessing large-language models to generate private synthetic text

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for generating high-quality differentially private synthetic text data using large language models, enabling reuse and sharing without privacy risks.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel training objective and parameter tuning strategy that significantly improves the quality of DP synthetic text data generated by large language models.

Findings

Synthetic data achieves performance comparable to direct DP training.

Synthetic data can be used for downstream model tuning.

Proposed method outperforms previous approaches in data quality.

Abstract

Differentially private training algorithms like DP-SGD protect sensitive training data by ensuring that trained models do not reveal private information. An alternative approach, which this paper studies, is to use a sensitive dataset to generate synthetic data that is differentially private with respect to the original data, and then non-privately training a model on the synthetic data. Doing so has several advantages: synthetic data can be reused for other tasks (including for hyper parameter tuning), retained indefinitely, and shared with third parties without sacrificing privacy. However, generating private synthetic data is much harder than training a private model. To improve performance on text data, recent work has utilized public data by starting with a pre-trained generative language model and privately fine-tuning it on sensitive data. This model can be used to sample a DP synthetic dataset. While this strategy seems straightforward, executing it has proven problematic. Previous approaches either show significant performance loss, or have, as we show, critical design flaws. In this paper we demonstrate that a proper training objective along with tuning fewer parameters results in excellent DP synthetic data quality. Our approach is competitive with direct DP-training of downstream classifiers in terms of performance on downstream tasks. Further, we demonstrate that our DP synthetic data is not only useful for downstream classifier training, but also to tune those same models.