Private Stochastic Convex Optimization with Heavy Tails: Near-Optimality from Simple Reductions

We study the problem of differentially private stochastic convex optimization (DP-SCO) with heavy-tailed gradients, where we assume a k^th-moment bound on the Lipschitz constants of sample functions rather than a uniform bound. We propose a new reduction-based approach that enables us to obtain the first optimal rates (up to logarithmic factors) in the heavy-tailed setting, achieving error G_2 ·1/√(n) + G_k · (√(d)/nϵ)^1 - 1/k under (ϵ, δ)-approximate differential privacy, up to a mild (1/δ) factor, where G_2^2 and G_k^k are the 2^nd and k^th moment bounds on sample Lipschitz constants, nearly-matching a lower bound of [Lowy and Razaviyayn 2023]. We further give a suite of private algorithms in the heavy-tailed setting which improve upon our basic result under additional assumptions, including an optimal algorithm under a known-Lipschitz constant assumption, a near-linear time algorithm for smooth functions, and an optimal linear time algorithm for smooth generalized linear models.