Opacus: User-Friendly Differential Privacy Library in PyTorch
This provides a user-friendly tool for machine learning practitioners to implement differential privacy, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
They introduced Opacus, a PyTorch library for training deep learning models with differential privacy, enabling practitioners to add privacy with minimal code changes and supporting various layers efficiently.
We introduce Opacus, a free, open-source PyTorch library for training deep learning models with differential privacy (hosted at opacus.ai). Opacus is designed for simplicity, flexibility, and speed. It provides a simple and user-friendly API, and enables machine learning practitioners to make a training pipeline private by adding as little as two lines to their code. It supports a wide variety of layers, including multi-head attention, convolution, LSTM, GRU (and generic RNN), and embedding, right out of the box and provides the means for supporting other user-defined layers. Opacus computes batched per-sample gradients, providing higher efficiency compared to the traditional "micro batch" approach. In this paper we present Opacus, detail the principles that drove its implementation and unique features, and benchmark it against other frameworks for training models with differential privacy as well as standard PyTorch.