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arXiv · 2501.19080

Differentially Private Policy Gradient

Alexandre Rio·Merwan Barlier·Igor Colin
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Abstract

Motivated by the increasing deployment of reinforcement learning in the real world, involving a large consumption of personal data, we introduce a differentially private (DP) policy gradient algorithm. We show that, in this setting, the introduction of Differential Privacy can be reduced to the computation of appropriate trust regions, thus avoiding the sacrifice of theoretical properties of the DP-less methods. Therefore, we show that it is possible to find the right trade-off between privacy noise and trust-region size to obtain a performant differentially private policy gradient algorithm. We then outline its performance empirically on various benchmarks. Our results and the complexity of the tasks addressed represent a significant improvement over existing DP algorithms in online RL.

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Alexandre Rio, Merwan Barlier, Igor Colin. 2025-01-31. Differentially Private Policy Gradient. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.19080

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