In this paper, we consider the problem of designing Differentially Private (DP) algorithms for Stochastic Convex Optimization (SCO) on heavy-tailed data. The irregularity of such data violates some key assumptions used in almost all existing DP-SCO and DP-ERM methods, resulting in failure to provide the DP guarantees. To better understand this type of challenges, we provide in this paper a comprehensive study of DP-SCO under various settings. First, we consider the case where the loss function is strongly convex and smooth. For this case, we propose a method based on the sample-and-aggregate framework, which has an excess population risk of $\tilde{O}(\frac{d^3}{n\epsilon^4})$ (after omitting other factors), where $n$ is the sample size and $d$ is the dimensionality of the data. Then, we show that with some additional assumptions on the loss functions, it is possible to reduce the \textit{expected} excess population risk to $\tilde{O}(\frac{ d^2}{ n\epsilon^2 })$. To lift these additional conditions, we also provide a gradient smoothing and trimming based scheme to achieve excess population risks of $\tilde{O}(\frac{ d^2}{n\epsilon^2})$ and $\tilde{O}(\frac{d^\frac{2}{3}}{(n\epsilon^2)^\frac{1}{3}})$ for strongly convex and general convex loss functions, respectively, \textit{with high probability}. Experiments suggest that our algorithms can effectively deal with the challenges caused by data irregularity.

本文提出了一种基于采样和聚合框架的方法和基于梯度平滑和剪枝的方案，可有效应对重尾型数据下的不规则性挑战，实现了强凸和一般凸损失函数的差分隐私，且在高概率下应达到预期的超额群体风险水平。

带重尾数据的差分隐私随机凸优化