arXiv Machine Learning

The pretraining domain outweighs the training objective in setting the privacy-utility trade-off of differentially private medical image analysis

arXiv:2601. 19618v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Differential privacy protects the patients whose images train medical imaging models, but it lowers diagnostic accuracy, and the initialization is the strongest known remedy.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Pushing the (Decision) Boundaries: Dynamically Calibrating Differentially Private Noise to Explainability in Federated Learning

The paper introduces XCal-FL, a federated learning algorithm that dynamically calibrates differential privacy noise using three signals—prediction logit variations, counterfactual margins, and saliency concentration—to improve both predictive accuracy and explanation fidelity. Experiments on medical imaging datasets demonstrate that XCal-FL outperforms static-noise and state‑of‑the‑art adaptive DP methods, achieving over 10% better accuracy and up to fivefold higher explanation fidelity while using privacy budgets more efficiently. The study highlights that explanation fidelity behaves non‑linearly with privacy loss, indicating that explainability is a separate dimension of the privacy trade‑off.

By Michael Khavkin, Kichang Lee, Jaeho Jin, JeongGil Ko, Eran Toch
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Pushing the (Decision) Boundaries: Dynamically Calibrating Differentially Private Noise to Explainability in Federated Learning

The paper introduces XCal-FL, a federated learning algorithm that dynamically calibrates differential privacy noise using three signals—prediction logit variations, counterfactual margins, and saliency concentration—to improve both predictive accuracy and explanation fidelity. Experiments on medical imaging datasets demonstrate that XCal-FL outperforms static-noise and state‑of‑the‑art adaptive DP methods, achieving over 10% better accuracy and up to five‑fold higher explanation fidelity while using privacy budgets more efficiently. The study reveals that explanation fidelity behaves non‑linearly with privacy loss, indicating that explainability is a separate dimension of the privacy trade‑off that cannot be inferred from utility alone.

arXiv AI
Sep 16

Differential privacy representation geometry for medical image analysis

The paper introduces Differential Privacy Representation Geometry for Medical Imaging (DP‑RGMI), a framework that interprets differential privacy as a structured transformation of representation space. DP‑RGMI decomposes performance loss into encoder geometry—measured by representation displacement and spectral effective dimension—and task‑head utilization, quantified by the gap between linear‑probe and end‑to‑end utility. Across 594,000 chest X‑ray images from four datasets, the study finds that differential privacy consistently creates a utilization gap even when linear separability remains, while displacement and spectral dimension vary non‑monotonically with initialization and dataset, indicating that privacy alters representation anisotropy rather than uniformly collapsing features.

By Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Marziyeh Mohammadi, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Optimizing Canaries for Privacy Auditing with Metagradient Descent

The paper investigates black-box privacy auditing for differentially private learning algorithms, focusing on DP‑SGD. It introduces a method that optimizes the auditor’s canary set using metagradient descent, improving empirical lower bounds on privacy parameters compared to prior canary designs. The approach is shown to be DP‑SGD agnostic and efficient, with optimized canaries for small models remaining effective for larger DP‑SGD models.

By Matteo Boglioni, Terrance Liu, Andrew Ilyas, Zhiwei Steven Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Picture the Epsilon: Pursuing Identity-Level Privacy Guarantees for Images

The paper compares four audit methods for assessing identity‑level differential privacy in pre‑trained, black‑box face generators. Each method—GaussMech, KDE‑LR, MMD‑TV, and ROC‑HT—has distinct assumptions, hyperparameters, and finite‑sample limitations, and they produce markedly different epsilon estimates when applied to FaceFusion and InstantID. The study finds that all methods reveal significant identity distinguishability, but none can be reliably ranked in this high‑distinguishability regime, suggesting that future work should evaluate them on partially private mechanisms.

By Arman Zareian Jahromi, Vishnu Bondalakunta, Mohammad Akbar Bin Shah, Naimul Haque, Shuangqing Wei, George T. Amariucai
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Self-supervision drives representational convergence in medical foundation models more than clinical supervision

arXiv:2607. 20274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical image encoders from different groups are increasingly treated as interchangeable, on the assumption that scale and clinical supervision concentrate their representations onto a shared structure.

By Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Mahshad Lotfinia, Lisa Adams, Sven Nebelung, Jakob Nikolas Kather, Daniel Truhn
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Federated LoRA Adaptation of BiomedCLIP Across Four International Chest X-Ray Cohorts

The paper evaluates federated learning with Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for fine‑tuning the BiomedCLIP vision‑language model on chest X‑ray classification across four international cohorts. Federated LoRA improves shared‑class AUC from 0.687 to 0.802, outperforming isolated single‑cohort training and approaching a centralized reference. The study shows that SVD‑based product‑space aggregation (FlexLoRA) is crucial for performance, while FedProx offers no advantage over FedAvg in this setting.

By Sanjaya Poudel, Nirajan Kunwor, Manish Dhakal, Debesh Jha, Sunil Kumar Gaire