{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/tempered-sigmoid-activations-for-deep","title":"Tempered Sigmoid Activations for Deep Learning with Differential Privacy","arxiv_id":"2007.14191","date":"2020-07-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nicolas Papernot","Abhradeep Thakurta","Shuang Song","Steve Chien","Úlfar Erlingsson"],"abstract":"Because learning sometimes involves sensitive data, machine learning algorithms have been extended to offer privacy for training data. In practice, this has been mostly an afterthought, with privacy-preserving models obtained by re-running training with a different optimizer, but using the model architectures that already performed well in a non-privacy-preserving setting. This approach leads to less than ideal privacy/utility tradeoffs, as we show here. Instead, we propose that model architectures are chosen ab initio explicitly for privacy-preserving training. To provide guarantees under the gold standard of differential privacy, one must bound as strictly as possible how individual training points can possibly affect model updates. In this paper, we are the first to observe that the choice of activation function is central to bounding the sensitivity of privacy-preserving deep learning. We demonstrate analytically and experimentally how a general family of bounded activation functions, the tempered sigmoids, consistently outperform unbounded activation functions like ReLU. Using this paradigm, we achieve new state-of-the-art accuracy on MNIST, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR10 without any modification of the learning procedure fundamentals or differential privacy analysis.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.14191v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.14191v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"tempered-sigmoid-activations-for-deep","repo_url":"https://github.com/woodyx218/opacus_global_clipping","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-learning","task_name":"Deep Learning"},{"task_slug":"privacy-preserving","task_name":"Privacy Preserving"},{"task_slug":"privacy-preserving-deep-learning","task_name":"Privacy Preserving Deep Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2007.14191","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2007.14191","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2007.14191"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/woodyx218/opacus_global_clipping","reach":null}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0084ec1c2df6dc92","entry":"test","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0084ec1c2df6dc92"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}