Abstract:We establish the first population risk bounds for Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) trained by mini-batch SGD with gradient clipping, covering non-private SGD as well as differentially private SGD (DP-SGD) with Gaussian perturbations that interpolate between independent and temporally correlated noise. This setting is substantially closer to practice than prior KAN theory along two axes: training is by mini-batch SGD, the standard recipe for modern networks, rather than full-batch gradient descent (GD); and correlated-noise mechanisms have empirically shown a more favorable privacy-utility tradeoff than independent-noise mechanisms. Our results cover the corresponding full-batch GD and independent-noise DP-GD results for KANs by Wang et al. (2026), while yielding sharper fixed-second-layer specializations. The technical core is a new analysis route for correlated-noise DP training in the non-convex regime. Temporal dependence breaks the conditional-centering structure underlying standard one-step SGD arguments, and the projection step obstructs the exact cancellation structure of correlated perturbations. We address these difficulties through an auxiliary unprojected dynamics, a shifted iterate that absorbs the current noise perturbation, and a high-probability bootstrap certifying projection inactivity. Combining this optimization analysis with a stability-based generalization argument yields the stated population risk bounds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first optimization and population risk analysis of a correlated-noise mechanism for DP training beyond convex learning, in particular for neural networks.
Abstract:We study privacy amplification for differentially private model training with matrix factorization under random allocation (also known as the balls-in-bins model). Recent work by Choquette-Choo et al. (2025) proposes a sampling-based Monte Carlo approach to compute amplification parameters in this setting. However, their guarantees either only hold with some high probability or require random abstention by the mechanism. Furthermore, the required number of samples for ensuring $(ε,δ)$-DP is inversely proportional to $δ$. In contrast, we develop sampling-free bounds based on Rényi divergence and conditional composition. The former is facilitated by a dynamic programming formulation to efficiently compute the bounds. The latter complements it by offering stronger privacy guarantees for small $ε$, where Rényi divergence bounds inherently lead to an over-approximation. Our framework applies to arbitrary banded and non-banded matrices. Through numerical comparisons, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach across a broad range of matrix mechanisms used in research and practice.




Abstract:Current state-of-the-art methods for differentially private model training are based on matrix factorization techniques. However, these methods suffer from high computational overhead because they require numerically solving a demanding optimization problem to determine an approximately optimal factorization prior to the actual model training. In this work, we present a new matrix factorization approach, BSR, which overcomes this computational bottleneck. By exploiting properties of the standard matrix square root, BSR allows to efficiently handle also large-scale problems. For the key scenario of stochastic gradient descent with momentum and weight decay, we even derive analytical expressions for BSR that render the computational overhead negligible. We prove bounds on the approximation quality that hold both in the centralized and in the federated learning setting. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that models trained using BSR perform on par with the best existing methods, while completely avoiding their computational overhead.