Differential privacy (DP) offers a robust framework for safeguarding
individual data privacy. To utilize DP in training modern machine learning
models, differentially private optimizers have been widely used in recent
years. A popular approach to privatize an optimizer is to clip the individual
gradients and add sufficiently large noise to the clipped gradient. This
approach led to the development of DP optimizers that have comparable
performance with their non-private counterparts in fine-tuning tasks or in
tasks with a small number of training parameters. However, a significant
performance drop is observed when these optimizers are applied to large-scale
training. This degradation stems from the substantial noise injection required
to maintain DP, which disrupts the optimizer's dynamics. This paper introduces
DiSK, a novel framework designed to significantly enhance the performance of DP
optimizers. DiSK employs Kalman filtering, a technique drawn from control and
signal processing, to effectively denoise privatized gradients and generate
progressively refined gradient estimations. To ensure practicality for
large-scale training, we simplify the Kalman filtering process, minimizing its
memory and computational demands. We establish theoretical privacy-utility
trade-off guarantees for DiSK, and demonstrate provable improvements over
standard DP optimizers like DPSGD in terms of iteration complexity upper-bound.
Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including vision tasks such as
CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1k and language fine-tuning tasks such as GLUE, E2E, and
DART, validate the effectiveness of DiSK. The results showcase its ability to
significantly improve the performance of DP optimizers, surpassing
state-of-the-art results under the same privacy constraints on several
benchmarks.