DPGEN: Differentially Private Generative Energy-Guided Network for Natural Image Synthesis

Despite an increased demand for valuable data, the privacy concerns associated with sensitive datasets present a barrier to data sharing. One may use differentially private generative models to generate synthetic data. Unfortunately, generators are typically restricted to generating images of low-resolutions due to the limitation of noisy gradients. Here, we propose DPGEN, a network model designed to synthesize high-resolution natural images while satisfying differential privacy. In particular, we propose an energy-guided network trained on sanitized data to indicate the direction of the true data distribution via Langevin Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling method. In contrast to the state-of-the-art methods that can process only low-resolution images (e.g., MNIST and Fashion-MNIST), DPGEN can generate differentially private synthetic images with resolutions up to 128 × 128 with superior visual quality and data utility. Our code is available at https://github.com/chiamuyu/DPGEN