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arxiv 2109.12298 v4 pith:WNW5T5I5 submitted 2021-09-25 cs.LG cs.CR

Opacus: User-Friendly Differential Privacy Library in PyTorch

classification cs.LG cs.CR
keywords opacusdifferentialprivacypytorchtraininglayerslearninglibrary
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We introduce Opacus, a free, open-source PyTorch library for training deep learning models with differential privacy (hosted at opacus.ai). Opacus is designed for simplicity, flexibility, and speed. It provides a simple and user-friendly API, and enables machine learning practitioners to make a training pipeline private by adding as little as two lines to their code. It supports a wide variety of layers, including multi-head attention, convolution, LSTM, GRU (and generic RNN), and embedding, right out of the box and provides the means for supporting other user-defined layers. Opacus computes batched per-sample gradients, providing higher efficiency compared to the traditional "micro batch" approach. In this paper we present Opacus, detail the principles that drove its implementation and unique features, and benchmark it against other frameworks for training models with differential privacy as well as standard PyTorch.

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Cited by 28 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Dithered Gaussian Mechanism for Randomness-Efficient Differential Privacy

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    The dithered Gaussian mechanism discretizes the output of the Gaussian mechanism via a randomly shifted grid, inheriting Gaussian privacy guarantees while reducing private randomness to a constant per coordinate.

  2. Fair Finetuning Mitigates Distribution Inference Attacks

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 7.0

    Fair fine-tuning under Equalized Odds yields a tight bound Adv(A, M_f) ≤ Δ_EO · W on adversarial advantage in distribution inference attacks, with empirical reductions below detection threshold across six datasets.

  3. Provable Robustness against Backdoor Attacks via the Primal-Dual Perspective on Differential Privacy

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A new framework is introduced for end-to-end provable robustness against backdoor attacks by composing randomized smoothing with differentially private training via privacy profiles.

  4. FML-bench: A Controlled Study of AI Research Agent Strategies from the Perspective of Search Dynamics

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    FML-Bench shows a simple greedy hill-climber nearly matches tree search on dense-opportunity tasks while an adaptive agent that broadens search on stagnation outperforms six baselines across 18 tasks.

  5. PACZero: PAC-Private Fine-Tuning of Language Models via Sign Quantization

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    PACZero achieves zero mutual information privacy for LLM fine-tuning via sign-quantized zeroth-order gradients, delivering near-non-private accuracy on SST-2 and SQuAD at I=0.

  6. PACZero: PAC-Private Fine-Tuning of Language Models via Sign Quantization

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    PACZero achieves zero mutual information privacy in LLM fine-tuning via sign-quantized subset-aggregated ZO gradients, delivering near non-private accuracy on SST-2 at I=0.

  7. Adaptive Selection of LoRA Components in Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    AS-LoRA adaptively chooses which LoRA factor to update per layer and round using a curvature-aware second-order score, eliminating reconstruction error floors and improving performance in DP federated learning.

  8. FIBER: A Differentially Private Optimizer with Filter-Aware Innovation Bias Correction

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    FiBeR adds a closed-form filter-aware correction A(ω)σ_w² to the second-moment term for temporally filtered DP gradients, improving adaptive optimization performance.

  9. Differentially Private Contrastive Learning via Bounding Group-level Contribution

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DP-GCL improves differentially private contrastive learning by bounding group-level contributions through batch partitioning and intra-group augmentation, delivering 5.6% higher image classification accuracy and 20.1%...

  10. Differentially Private Model Merging

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Post-processing via random selection or linear combination generates differentially private models for arbitrary privacy parameters from pre-trained models on the same dataset.

  11. DPrivBench: Benchmarking LLMs' Reasoning for Differential Privacy

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DPrivBench shows that top LLMs handle basic differential privacy mechanisms but fail on advanced algorithms, exposing gaps in automated DP reasoning.

  12. DPrivBench: Benchmarking LLMs' Reasoning for Differential Privacy

    cs.LG 2026-04 accept novelty 7.0

    DPrivBench is a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs on differential privacy reasoning, with results showing good performance on textbook mechanisms but substantial failures on advanced algorithms.

  13. DPQuant: Efficient and Differentially-Private Model Training via Dynamic Quantization Scheduling

    cs.LG 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DPQuant uses epoch-wise probabilistic layer rotation and DP loss sensitivity to quantize only a changing subset of layers, reducing accuracy degradation from quantization noise in DP-SGD and delivering up to 2.21x thr...

  14. Privacy Leakage via Output Label Space and Differentially Private Continual Learning

    cs.LG 2024-11 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Identifies output label space as a privacy side-channel in DP continual learning, formalizes DP for CL, and demonstrates two mitigation methods yielding higher accuracy than prior work.

  15. Privacy-Preserving Federated Autoencoder for ECG Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices

    cs.CR 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    A federated system combining autoencoders, FedAvg, Renyi DP-SGD, and INT8 quantization matches centralized AUROC performance (0.782 for ConvAE) on PTB-XL while halving model size and cutting edge latency by up to 44% ...

  16. Provably Communication-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Federated Graph Neural Networks

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CE-FedGNN enables federated GNN training on coupled distributed graphs via infrequent aggregated representation exchange, moving-average estimation for staleness, and metric-DP, with O(1/sqrt(T)) convergence and O(T^{...

  17. Efficient DP-SGD for LLMs with Randomized Clipping

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DP-SGD-RC applies Hutchinson and Hutch++ estimators to approximate per-sample gradient norms for clipping in DP-SGD, claiming competitive privacy noise multipliers and utility on Llama 3.2-1B with reduced memory.

  18. An exponential mechanism based on quadratic approximations for fine-tuning machine learning models with privacy guarantees

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A differentially private fine-tuning method that constructs a quadratic utility function to allow exact sampling from a multivariate normal distribution while providing theoretical privacy guarantees.

  19. FML-bench: A Controlled Study of AI Research Agent Strategies from the Perspective of Search Dynamics

    cs.LG 2026-05 accept novelty 6.0

    FML-Bench shows that a simple greedy hill-climber performs nearly as well as complex tree-search agents on ML research tasks, with an adaptive strategy that switches exploration modes outperforming all tested agents.

  20. Private Speech Classification without Collapse: Stabilized DP Training and Offline Distillation

    cs.SD 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A stabilized DP training and offline distillation protocol prevents collapse to single-class predictors in private speech classification under strong privacy while releasing only an audio-only model.

  21. Differentially Private Modeling of Disease Transmission within Human Contact Networks

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A differentially private pipeline using node-level DP summaries to fit ERGMs or SBMs, generate synthetic networks, and simulate SIS disease spread on ARTNet sexual contact data produces incidence, prevalence, and inte...

  22. Fundamental Limitations of Favorable Privacy-Utility Guarantees for DP-SGD

    cs.LG 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Shuffled DP-SGD requires σ ≥ 1/√(2 ln M) or κ ≥ (1/√8)(1 - 1/√(4π ln M)) to limit adversarial advantage, preventing strong privacy and high utility simultaneously.

  23. FedVideoMAE: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Federated Video Moderation

    cs.CV 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0

    FedVideoMAE combines VideoMAE pretraining, LoRA adaptation, client DP-SGD and secure aggregation to cut federated communication 28x while reaching 65-66% accuracy under strong privacy on RWF-2000 with 40 clients.

  24. Beyond Membership: Limitations of Add/Remove Adjacency in Differential Privacy

    cs.CR 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Add/remove adjacency in DP overstates attribute privacy relative to substitute adjacency; new auditing attacks confirm inconsistency with add/remove reports but consistency with substitute accounting.

  25. Class-Aware Adaptive Differential Privacy in Deep Learning for Sensor-Based Fall Detection

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    CA-ADP adjusts differential privacy noise per mini-batch class composition to improve F-scores by 3.3-8.5% over standard DP on three fall-detection datasets while claiming formal (ε,δ) guarantees.

  26. Differentially Private Model Merging

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Post-processing via random selection or linear combination of differentially private models allows meeting arbitrary target privacy parameters without additional training.

  27. Secure and Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Three optimized MPC protocols for privacy-preserving vertical federated learning that support global and global-local updates while reducing computation versus naive full-MPC delegation.

  28. On Optimal Hyperparameters for Differentially Private Deep Transfer Learning

    cs.LG 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Empirical study of DP transfer learning reveals that larger clipping bounds outperform under tight privacy and cumulative DP noise explains batch-size effects better than existing heuristics.