Papers › Differentially Private Diffusion Models

Differentially Private Diffusion Models

18 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.09929archive 2025-07-28

Tim Dockhorn, Tianshi Cao, Arash Vahdat, Karsten Kreis

While modern machine learning models rely on increasingly large training datasets, data is often limited in privacy-sensitive domains. Generative models trained with differential privacy (DP) on sensitive data can sidestep this challenge, providing access to synthetic data instead. We build on the recent success of diffusion models (DMs) and introduce Differentially Private Diffusion Models (DPDMs), which enforce privacy using differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD). We investigate the DM parameterization and the sampling algorithm, which turn out to be crucial ingredients in DPDMs, and propose noise multiplicity, a powerful modification of DP-SGD tailored to the training of DMs. We validate our novel DPDMs on image generation benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance in all experiments. Moreover, on standard benchmarks, classifiers trained on DPDM-generated synthetic data perform on par with task-specific DP-SGD-trained classifiers, which has not been demonstrated before for DP generative models. Project page and code: https://nv-tlabs.github.io/DPDM.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

nv-tlabs/dpdm mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Diffusion

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections