Private Set Generation with Discriminative Information

Summary

Differentially private data generation techniques have become a promising solution to the data privacy challenge –– it enables sharing of data while complying with rigorous privacy guarantees, which is essential for scientific progress in sensitive domains. Unfortunately, restricted by the inherent complexity of modeling high-dimensional distributions, existing private generative models are struggling with the utility of synthetic samples. In contrast to existing works that aim at fitting the complete data distribution, we directly optimize for a small set of samples that are representative of the distribution, which is generally an easier task and more suitable for private training. Moreover, we exploit discriminative information from downstream tasks to further ease the training. Our work provides an alternative view for differentially private generation of high-dimensional data and introduces a simple yet effective method that greatly improves the sample utility of state-of-the-art approaches.