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Abstract
As Large Language Models (LLMs) proliferate, developing privacy safeguards
for these models is crucial. One popular safeguard involves training LLMs in a
differentially private manner. However, such solutions are shown to be
computationally expensive and detrimental to the utility of these models. Since
LLMs are deployed on the cloud and thus only accessible via an API, a Machine
Learning as a Service (MLaaS) provider can protect its downstream data by
privatizing the predictions during the decoding process. However, the
practicality of such solutions still largely lags behind DP training methods.
One recent promising approach, Private Mixing of Ensemble Distributions
(PMixED), avoids additive noise by sampling from the output distributions of
private LLMs mixed with the output distribution of a public model. Yet, PMixED
must satisfy a fixed privacy level for a given number of queries, which is
difficult for an analyst to estimate before inference and, hence, does not
scale. To this end, we relax the requirements to a more practical setting by
introducing Adaptive PMixED (AdaPMixED), a private decoding framework based on
PMixED that is adaptive to the private and public output distributions
evaluated on a given input query. In this setting, we introduce a noisy
screening mechanism that filters out queries with potentially expensive privacy
loss, and a data-dependent analysis that exploits the divergence of the private
and public output distributions in its privacy loss calculation. Our
experimental evaluations demonstrate that our mechanism and analysis can reduce
the privacy loss by 16x while preserving the utility over the original PMixED.
Furthermore, performing 100K predictions with AdaPMixED still achieves strong
utility and a reasonable data-dependent privacy loss of 5.25.