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Hugh Brendan McMahan

11 accepted papers

2025

It's My Data Too: Private ML for Datasets with Multi-User Training Examples

ICML 2025poster

We initiate a study of algorithms for model training with user-level differential privacy (DP), where each example may be attributed to multiple users, which we call the multi-attribution model. We first provide a carefully chosen definition of user-level DP under the multi-attribution model. Traini…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

A Hassle-free Algorithm for Strong Differential Privacy in Federated Learning Systems

EMNLP 2024industry

Differential privacy (DP) and federated learning (FL) are combined as advanced privacy-preserving methods when training on-device language models in production mobile keyboard applications. DP-Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (DP-FTRL) algorithms, leveraging correlated noise mechanisms such as tree agg…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

One-shot Empirical Privacy Estimation for Federated Learning

ICLR 2024oral

Privacy estimation techniques for differentially private (DP) algorithms are useful for comparing against analytical bounds, or to empirically measure privacy loss in settings where known analytical bounds are not tight. However, existing privacy auditing techniques usually make strong assumptions o…

2023

(Amplified) Banded Matrix Factorization: A unified approach to private training

NeurIPS 2023poster

Matrix factorization (MF) mechanisms for differential privacy (DP) have substantially improved the state-of-the-art in privacy-utility-computation tradeoffs for ML applications in a variety of scenarios, but in both the centralized and federated settings there remain instances where either MF cannot…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2023

Differentially Private Adaptive Optimization with Delayed Preconditioners

ICLR 2023poster

Privacy costs may negate the benefits of using adaptive optimizers in differentially private model training. Prior works typically address this issue by using auxiliary information (e.g., public data) to boost the effectiveness of adaptive optimization. In this work, we explore techniques to estimat…

2023

Gradient Descent with Linearly Correlated Noise: Theory and Applications to Differential Privacy

NeurIPS 2023poster

We study gradient descent under linearly correlated noise. Our work is motivated by recent practical methods for optimization with differential privacy (DP), such as DP-FTRL, which achieve strong performance in settings where privacy amplification techniques are infeasible (such as in federated lear…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Multi-Epoch Matrix Factorization Mechanisms for Private Machine Learning

ICML 2023oral

We introduce new differentially private (DP) mechanisms for gradient-based machine learning (ML) with multiple passes (epochs) over a dataset, substantially improving the achievable privacy-utility-computation tradeoffs. We formalize the problem of DP mechanisms for adaptive streams with multiple pa…

2023

Unleashing the Power of Randomization in Auditing Differentially Private ML

NeurIPS 2023poster

We present a rigorous methodology for auditing differentially private machine learning by adding multiple carefully designed examples called canaries. We take a first principles approach based on three key components. First, we introduce Lifted Differential Privacy (LiDP) that expands the definition…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improved Differential Privacy for SGD via Optimal Private Linear Operators on Adaptive Streams

NeurIPS 2022accept

Motivated by recent applications requiring differential privacy in the setting of adaptive streams, we investigate the question of optimal instantiations of the matrix mechanism in this setting. We prove fundamental theoretical results on the applicability of matrix factorizations to the adaptive s…

2021

Adaptive Federated Optimization

ICLR 2021poster

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm in which a large number of clients coordinate with a central server to learn a model without sharing their own training data. Standard federated optimization methods such as Federated Averaging (FedAvg) are often difficult to tune and exh…

2021

Differentially Private Learning with Adaptive Clipping

NeurIPS 2021poster

Existing approaches for training neural networks with user-level differential privacy (e.g., DP Federated Averaging) in federated learning (FL) settings involve bounding the contribution of each user's model update by {\em clipping} it to some constant value. However there is no good {\em a priori}…

Cited by 431SourcePDFScholar