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Can Public Large Language Models Help Private Cross-device Federated Learning?
Boxin Wang · Yibo J. Zhang · Yuan Cao · Bo Li · Hugh B McMahan · Sewoong Oh · Zheng Xu · Manzil Zaheer

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in Challenges in Deployable Generative AI »
Event URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=FuxYkfMkiq »

We study (differentially) private federated learning (FL) of language models. The language models in cross-device FL are relatively small, which can be trained with meaningful formal user-level differential privacy (DP) guarantees when massive parallelism in training is enabled by the participation of a moderate size of users. Recently, public data has been used to improve privacy-utility trade-offs for both large and small language models. In this work, we provide a systematic study of using large-scale public data and LLMs to help differentially private training of on-device FL models, and further improve the privacy-utility tradeoff by techniques of distillation. Moreover, we propose a novel distribution matching algorithm with theoretical grounding to sample public data close to private data distribution, which significantly improves the sample efficiency of (pre)training on public data. The proposed method is efficient and effective for training private models by taking advantage of public data, especially for customized on-device architectures that do not have ready-to-use pre-trained models.

Keywords: federated learning · large language models · differential privacy · on device

Author Information

Boxin Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Yibo J. Zhang (Stanford University)
Yuan Cao (Google)
Bo Li (UIUC)
Bo Li

Dr. Bo Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is the recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, AI’s 10 to Watch, NSF CAREER Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, C.W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Intel Rising Star award, Symantec Research Labs Fellowship, Rising Star Award, Research Awards from Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Intel, IBM, and eBay, and best paper awards at several top machine learning and security conferences. Her research focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of trustworthy machine learning, which is at the intersection of machine learning, security, privacy, and game theory. She has designed several scalable frameworks for trustworthy machine learning and privacy-preserving data publishing. Her work has been featured by major publications and media outlets such as Nature, Wired, Fortune, and New York Times.

Hugh B McMahan (Google)
Sewoong Oh (University of Washington)
Zheng Xu (Google Research)
Manzil Zaheer (Google DeepMind)

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