Privacy is an important concern when building statistical models on data containing personal information. Differential privacy offers a strong definition of privacy and can be used to solve several privacy concerns (Dwork et al., 2014). Multiple solutions have been proposed for the differentially-private transformation of datasets containing sensitive information. However, such transformation algorithms offer poor utility in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks due to noise added in the process. In this paper, we address this issue by providing a utility-preserving differentially private text transformation algorithm using auto-encoders. Our algorithm transforms text to offer robustness against attacks and produces transformations with high semantic quality that perform well on downstream NLP tasks. We prove the theoretical privacy guarantee of our algorithm and assess its privacy leakage under Membership Inference Attacks(MIA) (Shokri et al., 2017) on models trained with transformed data. Our results show that the proposed model performs better against MIA attacks while offering lower to no degradation in the utility of the underlying transformation process compared to existing baselines.

提出了一种使用自编码器的实用性保留差分隐私文本转换算法，具有高语义质量并在下游NLP任务中表现良好，证明了算法的理论隐私保证，并评估了基于转换数据训练的模型下成员推理攻击的隐私泄漏。结果表明，与现有的基线相比，所提出的模型在MIA攻击方面表现更好，同时提供更低或没有底层转换过程中效用的降低。

ADePT：基于自编码器的差分隐私文本转换