Privacy Preserving Reinforcement Learning for Population Processes

We consider the problem of privacy protection in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms that operate over population processes, a practical but understudied setting that includes, for example, the control of epidemics in large populations of dynamically interacting individuals. In this setting, the RL algorithm interacts with the population over \(T\) time steps by receiving population-level statistics as state and performing actions which can affect the entire population at each time step. An individual's data can be collected across multiple interactions and their privacy must be protected at all times. We clarify the Bayesian semantics of Differential Privacy (DP) in the presence of correlated data in population processes through a Pufferfish Privacy analysis. We then give a meta algorithm that can take any RL algorithm as input and make it differentially private. This is achieved by taking an approach that uses DP mechanisms to privatize the state and reward signal at each time step before the RL algorithm receives them as input. Our main theoretical result shows that the value-function approximation error when applying standard RL algorithms directly to the privatized states shrinks quickly as the population size and privacy budget increase. This highlights that reasonable privacy-utility trade-offs are possible for differentially private RL algorithms in population processes. Our theoretical findings are validated by experiments performed on a simulated epidemic control problem over large population sizes.