CoRTeC: A Differentially Private Release for Synthetic Tabular Data, Decodable by Any Generator

Abstract

The records that could train the most useful models, such as a hospital's patient files, are often the ones an institution cannot share. We propose CoRTeC, a method that releases synthetic versions of such records under differential privacy. Differential privacy places a proven limit on what the synthetic data can reveal about any person, and in particular on membership inference. CoRTeC spends the privacy budget once, on a small file of noisy counts designed for training a classifier. For each group of records, the file gives the group's size, its balance of outcomes, a histogram of every column for each outcome and the outcome rate in each of several non-overlapping cells. A reviewer can check every number before the file leaves the institution. Anyone can then turn the counts into synthetic rows, as often as they like and at no further privacy cost. A maximum-entropy decoder can do this without any language model, and so can each of the five frozen language models we tested. None of them ever sees a real record. A selection step then matches the rows to the released counts. Decoded without a language model, the automatically configured release at $\varepsilon = 2$ trains classifiers to within 0.02 AUC of a real sample of the same size on the Adult dataset, across three data splits. On NHANES and bank marketing, without the selection step, it stays within 0.05 AUC. On Adult, with a fixed cohort rule, the release carries the outcome rates a deployment names more closely than a real sample does, at some cost in accuracy on pairs of columns. Four controls show that most of the utility comes from the release and the selection step, and that a language model adds what it knows from the column names. No private row ever reaches a model, and no row CoRTeC generates copies a real one. The strongest membership attack stays far below the bound the budget allows.