cs.LGOct 2, 2026

Differential Privacy of Gradient Descent on Perturbed Objectives

Authors: Austin Watkins, Raman Arora

Organizations: Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218

Abstract

Objective perturbation adds a random linear term to a regularized empirical risk and releases the exact perturbed minimizer. We study the finite computation obtained by releasing the NN-th iterate of deterministic gradient descent on w↦F(w;S)+⟨z,w⟩w\mapsto F(w;S)+\langle z,w\rangle, where z∼N(0,σ2Id)z\sim\mathcal N(0,σ^2I_d) is drawn once before optimization. For strongly convex and smooth objectives with Lipschitz Hessian, we prove an explicit condition under which the map z↦wNz\mapsto w_N is a C1C^1-diffeomorphism on the bounded domains used in the privacy argument, with a quantitative lower bound on the smallest singular value of its Jacobian. This permits a direct change-of-variables analysis of the finite iterate. For generalized linear models, the resulting privacy-profile bound has no explicit ambient-dimension factor once the iteration condition holds, and its finite-iteration correction decreases geometrically. By letting the free truncation parameter grow slowly with NN, we recover the corresponding exact-minimizer certificate in the limit. We also bound the expected excess empirical risk by dσ2/(2μ)dσ^2/(2μ) plus a geometrically decreasing optimization term, and transfer the result to population risk without an additional multiplicative condition-number factor in the leading statistical terms.

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