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Poster

SelectFormer in Data Markets: Privacy-Preserving and Efficient Data Selection for Transformers with Multi-Party Computation

Xu Ouyang · Felix Xiaozhu Lin · Yangfeng Ji

Hall 3 + Hall 2B #560
[ ]
Thu 24 Apr 7 p.m. PDT — 9:30 p.m. PDT

Abstract: Critical to a free data market is $ \textit{private data selection}$, i.e. the model owner selects and then appraises training data from the data owner before both parties commit to a transaction. To keep the data and model private, this process shall evaluate the target model to be trained over Multi-Party Computation (MPC). While prior work suggests that evaluating Transformer-based models over MPC is prohibitively expensive, this paper makes it practical for the purpose of data selection. Our contributions are three: (1) a new pipeline for private data selection over MPC; (2) emulating high-dimensional nonlinear operators with low-dimension MLPs, which are trained on a small sample of the data of interest; (3) scheduling MPC in a parallel, multiphase fashion. We evaluate our method on diverse Transformer models and NLP/CV benchmarks. Compared to directly evaluating the target model over MPC, our method reduces the delay from thousands of hours to tens of hours, while only seeing around 0.20% accuracy degradation from training with the selected data.

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