Differentially Private Simple Genetic Algorithms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The differentially private (DP) selection problem is a fundamental building block in the private literature that is commonly solved with the exponential mechanism. It is well known that efficiency is the major drawback of the exponential mechanism, as the utility function must be computed for all elements in the domain. Genetic algorithms (GAs) use the principles of evolution in nature to efficiently search through large domains and select the best candidate. We observe that GAs have many appealing properties for DP Selection. These include being robust to noisy objectives, placing no restriction on the utility function, and efficient runtime for large domains. However, prior work investigating DP GAs has shown poor utility in practice and often gives the highest utility when zero generations are conducted (indicating that GA operations are not beneficial under DP). This work provides a new DPGA based on the simple GA that addresses the weaknesses of prior solutions. We reduce the destructive nature of previous GA operators and utilize several techniques to reduce the noise from DP. Our modifications allow us to utilize the GA operators over multiple generations (under DP) and improve the GA's overall utility over zero generation techniques. Our work shows that private GAs are competitive with state-of-the-art general and problem-specific solutions to the DP selection problem, with runtime sublinear in the domain size.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.048 | 0.126 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".