Marika Swanberg
I am a machine learning engineer (and researcher) on Google's Privacy Sandbox team in NYC. I graduated with my PhD from Boston University, advised by Adam Smith.
I am generally interested in real-world deployments of differential privacy (DP). In particular, I enjoy thinking about privacy risks against attackers with varying capabilities and designing accurate and scalable DP algorithms. Previously, I've dabbled in cryptography, theory of DP, and their connections to legal questions.
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Differentially private (DP) synthetic data is a versatile tool for enabling the analysis of private data. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have inspired a number of algorithm techniques for improving DP synthetic data generation. One family of approaches uses DP finetuning on the foundation model weights; however, the model weights for state-of-the-art models may not be public. In this work we propose two DP synthetic tabular data algorithms that only require API access to the foundation model. We adapt the Private Evolution algorithm (Lin et al., 2023; Xie et al., 2024) -- which was designed for image and text data -- to the tabular data domain. In our extension of Private Evolution, we define a query workload-based distance measure, which may be of independent interest. We propose a family of algorithms that use one-shot API access to LLMs, rather than adaptive queries to the LLM. Our findings reveal that API-access to powerful LLMs does not always improve the quality of DP synthetic data compared to established baselines that operate without such access. We provide insights into the underlying reasons and propose improvements to LLMs that could make them more effective for this application.
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Preview abstract
Differentially private (DP) synthetic data is a versatile tool for enabling the analysis of private data. With the rise of foundation models, a number of new synthetic data algorithms privately finetune the weights of foundation models to improve over existing approaches to generating private synthetic data. In this work, we propose two algorithms for using API access only to generate DP tabular synthetic data. We extend the Private Evolution algorithm \citep{lin2023differentially, xie2024differentially} to the tabular data domain, define a workload-based distance measure, and propose a family of algorithms that use one-shot API access to LLMs.
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Preview abstract
Differentially private (DP) synthetic data is a versatile tool for enabling the analysis of private data. With the rise of foundation models, a number of new synthetic data algorithms privately finetune the weights of foundation models to improve over existing approaches to generating private synthetic data. In this work, we propose two algorithms for using API access only to generate DP tabular synthetic data. We extend the Private Evolution algorithm \citep{lin2023differentially, xie2024differentially} to the tabular data domain, define a workload-based distance measure, and propose a family of algorithms that use one-shot API access to LLMs.
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