# Generating Synthetic Data with Formal Privacy Guarantees: State of the Art and the Road Ahead

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20846 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20846/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 80 of its 149 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07805/) (2020)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02762/) (2019)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [An Introduction to Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02691/) (2019)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [Membership Inference Attacks From First Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03570/) (2021)
- [Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00503/) (2019)
- [Renyi Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07476/) (2017)
- [OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00838/) (2024)
- [Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00159/) (2024)
- [MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01454/) (2021)
- [Differentially Private Fine-tuning of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06500/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Struct-Bench: A Benchmark for Differentially Private Structured Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10696/) (2025)
- [SynBench: A Benchmark for Differentially Private Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14594/) (2025)
- [Virus Infection Attack on LLMs: Your Poisoning Can Spread "VIA" Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23041/) (2025)
- [Generating High-quality Privacy-preserving Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Privacy-preserving synthetic data offers a promising solution to harness segregated data in high-stakes domains where information is compartmentalized for regulatory, privacy, or institutional reasons. This survey provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the landscape of privacy-preserving synthetic data, presenting the theoretical foundations of generative models and differential privacy followed by a review of state-of-the-art methods across tabular data, images, and text. Our synthesis of evaluation approaches highlights the fundamental trade-off between utility for down-stream tasks and privacy guarantees, while identifying critical research gaps: the lack of realistic benchmarks representing specialized domains and insufficient empirical evaluations required to contextualise formal guarantees. Through empirical analysis of four leading methods on five real-world datasets from specialized domains, we demonstrate significant performance degradation under realistic privacy constraints (ε ≤ 4), revealing a substantial gap between results reported on general domain benchmarks and performance on domain-specific data. %Our findings highlight key challenges including unaccounted privacy leakage, insufficient empirical verification of formal guarantees, and a critical deficit of realistic benchmarks. These challenges underscore the need for robust evaluation frameworks, standardized benchmarks for specialized domains, and improved techniques to address the unique requirements of privacy-sensitive fields such that this technology can deliver on its considerable potential.