R\'enyi Differential Privacy for Heavy-Tailed SDEs via Fractional Poincar\'e Inequalities

Abstract

Characterizing the differential privacy (DP) of learning algorithms has become a major challenge in recent years. In parallel, many studies suggested investigating the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with heavy-tailed noise, both as a model for modern deep learning models and to improve their performance. However, most DP bounds focus on light-tailed noise, where satisfactory guarantees have been obtained but the proposed techniques do not directly extend to the heavy-tailed setting. Recently, the first DP guarantees for heavy-tailed SGD were obtained. These results provide $(0,\delta)$-DP guarantees without requiring gradient clipping. Despite casting new light on the link between DP and heavy-tailed algorithms, these results have a strong dependence on the number of parameters and cannot be extended to other DP notions like the well-established R\'enyi differential privacy (RDP). In this work, we propose to address these limitations by deriving the first RDP guarantees for heavy-tailed SDEs, as well as their discretized counterparts. Our framework is based on new R\'enyi flow computations and the use of well-established fractional Poincar\'e inequalities. Under the assumption that such inequalities are satisfied, we obtain DP guarantees that have a much weaker dependence on the dimension compared to prior art.