Plausible Token Amplification for Improving Accuracy of Differentially Private In-Context Learning Based on Implicit Bayesian Inference

Abstract

We propose Plausible Token Amplification (PTA) to improve the accuracy of Differentially Private In-Context Learning (DP-ICL) using DP synthetic demonstrations. While Tang et al. empirically improved the accuracy of DP-ICL by limiting vocabulary space during DP synthetic demonstration generation, its theoretical basis remains unexplored. By interpreting ICL as implicit Bayesian inference on a concept underlying demonstrations, we not only provide theoretical evidence supporting Tang et al.'s empirical method but also introduce PTA, a refined method for modifying next-token probability distribution. Through the modification, PTA highlights tokens that distinctly represent the ground-truth concept underlying the original demonstrations. As a result, generated DP synthetic demonstrations guide the Large Language Model to successfully infer the ground-truth concept, which improves the accuracy of DP-ICL. Experimental evaluations on both synthetic and real-world text-classification datasets validated the effectiveness of PTA.