PILLAR: How to make semi-private learning more effective
Francesco Pinto Yaxi Hu Fanny Yang Amartya Sanyal
In Semi-Supervised Semi-Private (SP) learning, the learner has access to both
public unlabelled and private labelled data. We propose a computationally
efficient algorithm that, under mild assumptions on the data, provably achieves
significantly lower private labelled sample complexity and can be efficiently
run on real-world datasets. For this purpose, we leverage the features
extracted by networks pre-trained on public (labelled or unlabelled) data,
whose distribution can significantly differ from the one on which SP learning
is performed. To validate its empirical effectiveness, we propose a wide
variety of experiments under tight privacy constraints ($\epsilon = 0.1$) and
with a focus on low-data regimes. In all of these settings, our algorithm
exhibits significantly improved performance over available baselines that use
similar amounts of public data.