Exploring the Benefits of Differentially Private Pre-training and
  Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning for Table Transformers
Xilong Wang Chia-Mu Yu Pin-Yu Chen
For machine learning with tabular data, Table Transformer (TabTransformer) is
a state-of-the-art neural network model, while Differential Privacy (DP) is an
essential component to ensure data privacy. In this paper, we explore the
benefits of combining these two aspects together in the scenario of transfer
learning -- differentially private pre-training and fine-tuning of
TabTransformers with a variety of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT)
methods, including Adapter, LoRA, and Prompt Tuning. Our extensive experiments
on the ACSIncome dataset show that these PEFT methods outperform traditional
approaches in terms of the accuracy of the downstream task and the number of
trainable parameters, thus achieving an improved trade-off among parameter
efficiency, privacy, and accuracy. Our code is available at
github.com/IBM/DP-TabTransformer.