Differentially Private Decentralized Deep Learning with Consensus
  Algorithms
Jasmine Bayrooti Zhan Gao Amanda Prorok
Cooperative decentralized deep learning relies on direct information exchange
between communicating agents, each with access to a local dataset which should
be kept private. The goal is for all agents to achieve consensus on model
parameters after training. However, sharing parameters with untrustworthy
neighboring agents could leak exploitable information about local datasets. To
combat this, we introduce differentially private decentralized learning that
secures each agent's local dataset during and after cooperative training. In
our approach, we generalize Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent
(DP-SGD) -- a popular differentially private training method for centralized
deep learning -- to practical subgradient- and ADMM-based decentralized
learning methods. Our algorithms' differential privacy guarantee holds for
arbitrary deep learning objective functions, and we analyze the convergence
properties for strongly convex objective functions. We compare our algorithms
against centrally trained models on standard classification tasks and evaluate
the relationships between performance, privacy budget, graph connectivity, and
degree of training data overlap among agents. We find that differentially
private gradient tracking is resistant to performance degradation under sparse
graphs and non-uniform data distributions. Furthermore, we show that it is
possible to learn a model achieving high accuracies, within 3% of DP-SGD on
MNIST under (1, 10^-5)-differential privacy and within 6% of DP-SGD on
CIFAR-100 under (10, 10^-5)-differential privacy, without ever sharing raw data
with other agents. Open source code can be found at:
https://github.com/jbayrooti/dp-dec-learning.