Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.
Training text embedding models under differential privacy constraints is challenging due to the high dimensionality of language data and the presence of rare, identifying linguistic features. We propose DPED (Differentially Private Embedding Distillation), a framework that leverages teacher-student distillation with multi-layer noise injection to learn high-quality embeddings while providing differential privacy guarantees. DPED trains an ensemble of teacher models on disjoint subsets of sensitive text data, then transfers their knowledge to a student model through noisy aggregation at multiple layers. A rare-word-aware strategy adaptively handles infrequent words, improving privacy-utility trade-offs. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DPED outperforms standard differentially private training methods, achieving substantially higher utility at the same privacy budget.