Unlocking High-Accuracy Differentially Private Image Classification through Scale

According to empirical evidence from prior works, utility degradation in DP-SGD becomes more severe on larger neural network models – including the ones regularly used to achieve the best performance on challenging image classification benchmarks. Our work investigates this phenomenon and proposes a series of simple modifications to both the training procedure and model architecture, yielding a significant improvement on the accuracy of DP training on standard image classification benchmarks.