Differential Privacy, Linguistic Fairness, and Training Data Influence: Impossibility and Possibility Theorems for Multilingual Language Models

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Language models such as mBERT, XLM-R, and BLOOM aim to achieve multilingual generalization or compression to facilitate transfer to a large number of (potentially unseen) languages. However, these models should ideally also be private, linguistically fair, and transparent, by relating their predictions to training data. Can these requirements be simultaneously satisfied? We show that multilingual compression and linguistic fairness are compatible with differential privacy, but that differential privacy is at odds with training data influence sparsity, an objective for transparency. We further present a series of experiments on two common NLP tasks and evaluate multilingual compression and training data influence sparsity under different privacy guarantees, exploring these trade-offs in more detail. Our results suggest that we need to develop ways to jointly optimize for these objectives in order to find practical trade-offs.

Original languageEnglish
JournalProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume202
Pages (from-to)29354-29387
ISSN2640-3498
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event40th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2023 - Honolulu, United States
Duration: 23 Jul 202329 Jul 2023

Conference

Conference40th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2023
CountryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period23/07/202329/07/2023

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© 2023 Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. All rights reserved.

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