Paper 2026/600

Hadal: Centralized Label DP Training without a Trusted Party

Abstract

We explore distributed training in a setting where features are held by one party and labels are held by another. In this context, we focus on label Differential Privacy (DP), where the labels require privacy protection from the other party who learns the trained model. Previous approaches struggle to train accurate models in high-privacy settings (i.e. when $\epsilon \leq 1$), or typically require a trusted third party. To eliminate this trusted party while preserving model utility, we present PostScale, a novel Homomorphic Encryption (HE)-based protocol suited for high-privacy regimes with ciphertext multiplicative depth of two. Our protocol is suitable for a wide variety of models in the semi-honest setting and avoids leaking the model architecture as well as costly ciphertext operations like bootstrapping and rotations. We also present a multi-party sampling protocol for generating DP noise, and Hadal, a general-purpose dataflow-based framework for encrypted computation implementing our protocols. Hadal repurposes existing tools for use with HE, including comprehensive performance profiling capabilities, dual execution modes (eager and deferred), graph compiler-based optimization, and hyperparameter tuning. Our techniques achieve model utility similar to centralized DP while reducing communication by over 90% (from 1 TB to 8 GB per batch) and training time by 99% (from 54 minutes to 33 seconds) compared to related work that protects both features and labels. These improvements unlock larger models; we train Bert-tiny of Devlin et al. (2019), with 6.5 MB of parameters, in 20 ms per example in a LAN setting.