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Nonparametric Variational Differential Privacy via Embedding Parameter Clipping

arXiv cs.LG / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces a novel parameter clipping strategy for nonparametric variational differential privacy (NVDP) to improve privacy guarantees and numerical stability during training.
  • The clipping method is mathematically derived to minimize the R\'enyi Divergence upper bound, imposing constrained posterior parameters for better privacy control.
  • Empirical results show that the clipped model achieves tighter privacy bounds and enhanced performance on downstream tasks compared to an unconstrained baseline.
  • This approach advances the privacy-utility trade-off in variational models, making privacy-preserving language models more robust and practical for real-world applications.

Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.09583 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:Nonparametric Variational Differential Privacy via Embedding Parameter Clipping

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Abstract:The nonparametric variational information bottleneck (NVIB) provides the foundation for nonparametric variational differential privacy (NVDP), a framework for building privacy-preserving language models. However, the learned latent representations can drift into regions with high information content, leading to poor privacy guarantees, but also low utility due to numerical instability during training. In this work, we introduce a principled parameter clipping strategy to directly address this issue. Our method is mathematically derived from the objective of minimizing the Rényi Divergence (RD) upper bound, yielding specific, theoretically grounded constraints on the posterior mean, variance, and mixture weight parameters. We apply our technique to an NVIB based model and empirically compare it against an unconstrained baseline. Our findings demonstrate that the clipped model consistently achieves tighter RD bounds, implying stronger privacy, while simultaneously attaining higher performance on several downstream tasks. This work presents a simple yet effective method for improving the privacy-utility trade-off in variational models, making them more robust and practical.
Comments:
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09583 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2603.09583v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09583
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Dina El Zein [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:34:03 UTC (102 KB)
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