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Private Fine-tuning of Large Language Models with Zeroth-order Optimization

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arxiv 2401.04343 v3 pith:UFKPMZDF submitted 2024-01-09 cs.LG cs.CLcs.CR

Private Fine-tuning of Large Language Models with Zeroth-order Optimization

classification cs.LG cs.CLcs.CR
keywords modelsdp-sgddp-zooptimizationprivatefine-tuninggradientlanguage
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) allows models to be trained in a privacy-preserving manner, but has proven difficult to scale to the era of foundation models. We introduce DP-ZO, a private fine-tuning framework for large language models by privatizing zeroth order optimization methods. A key insight into the design of our method is that the direction of the gradient in the zeroth-order optimization we use is random and the only information from training data is the step size, i.e., a scalar. Therefore, we only need to privatize the scalar step size, which is memory-efficient. DP-ZO provides a strong privacy-utility trade-off across different tasks, and model sizes that are comparable to DP-SGD in $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-DP. Notably, DP-ZO possesses significant advantages over DP-SGD in memory efficiency, and obtains higher utility in $\varepsilon$-DP when using the Laplace mechanism.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. Privacy Amplification in Differentially Private Zeroth-Order Optimization with Hidden States

    cs.LG 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    Introduces hybrid noise and novel coupling analysis to achieve the first convergent hidden-state DP bound for zeroth-order optimization.

  2. Probing Memorization of Tabular In-Context Learning

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A new probing framework detects moderate parametric memorization signals in tabular in-context learning models under single-task fine-tuning, strongest on low-cardinality tasks, but signals largely disappear under rea...

  3. Unveiling Privacy Risks in Multi-modal Large Language Models: Task-specific Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Challenges

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Introduces MM-Privacy dataset and evaluations showing MLLMs leak sensitive data from images in various tasks, highlighting task inconsistency effects.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. Memory-Efficient Differentially Private Training with Gradient Random Projection

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    DP-GRAPE reduces memory in differentially private neural network training by using random Gaussian projections on gradients instead of SVD, achieving comparable privacy-utility tradeoffs to DP-SGD and scaling to 6.7B ...