XXII.4TrustPro

Privacy and differential privacy

Trained models can leak their training data — through memorised text an attacker can extract, and through membership inference. Differential privacy defines what it would mean not to; the Laplace mechanism and DP-SGD achieve it at a price; federated learning keeps data on devices but is not, by itself, a privacy guarantee.

50 min

After this lesson you can

  • Describe training-data extraction and membership inference attacks, and why good generalisation doesn't prevent them
  • State the (ε, δ) definition of differential privacy and explain each symbol
  • Derive the Laplace mechanism and the attacker-accuracy bound that ε implies
  • Implement DP-SGD (per-example clipping plus Gaussian noise) and read a privacy-accounting result
  • Say what federated learning protects and what it does not

In this lesson

  1. How models leak
  2. Differential privacy: the definition
  3. The Laplace mechanism
  4. DP-SGD: private deep learning
  5. Federated learning: keeping data at home

This lesson is part of Descent Pro

Descent Pro unlocks every lesson on the route, from base camp to the summit. Every plan starts with a free trial.

Descent Pro

Start your free trial to keep reading

This lesson, and every other lesson on the route, is part of Descent Pro. Every plan starts with a free trial, and students with a .edu email get longer. Cancel before the trial ends and you pay nothing.