Real-Time Privacy Risk Measurement with Privacy Tokens for Gradient Leakage

The widespread deployment of deep learning models in privacy-sensitive domains has amplified concerns regarding privacy risks, particularly those stemming from gradient leakage during training. Current privacy assessments primarily rely on post-training attack simulations. However, these methods are inherently reactive, unable to encompass all potential attack scenarios, and often based on idealized adversarial assumptions. These limitations underscore the need for proactive approaches to privacy risk assessment during the training process. To address this gap, we propose the concept of privacy tokens, which are derived directly from private gradients during training. Privacy tokens encapsulate gradient features and, when combined with data features, offer valuable insights into the extent of private information leakage from training data, enabling real-time measurement of privacy risks without relying on adversarial attack simulations. Additionally, we employ Mutual Information (MI) as a robust metric to quantify the relationship between training data and gradients, providing precise and continuous assessments of privacy leakage throughout the training process. Extensive experiments validate our framework, demonstrating the effectiveness of privacy tokens and MI in identifying and quantifying privacy risks. This proactive approach marks a significant advancement in privacy monitoring, promoting the safer deployment of deep learning models in sensitive applications.