DP-ES: Differentially Private Evolution Strategies for Prompt Optimization

Abstract

Token-level differentially private (DP) prompt optimization methods such as DP-OPT can become unstable under tight privacy budgets: on GSM8K, DP-OPT obtains $49.5\pm28.5\%$ across 30 runs, and a logged search trajectory reveals prompt-template drift and noise-sensitive irreversible choices. We diagnose these as structural consequences of greedy token-by-token construction over privately aggregated counts. We then propose DP-ES (Differentially Private Evolution Strategies), a structurally cleaner alternative that maintains a population of full prompts, mutates them via LLM calls that never access the private dataset, and spends privacy only on sampled-Gaussian evaluation; deterministic or Gumbel-smoothed selection is post-processing. Under a conservative $(\varepsilon\leq1.0,\delta=10^{-5})$ guarantee, DP-ES achieves 88.1% on GSM8K (+38.6 pp over DP-OPT, approximately 9 times lower standard deviation), 99.7% on MedQA, 73.5% on BANKING77, and 86.8% on Alpaca. It is also 2.5 times faster in wall-clock time and uses 3.3 times fewer logged private-data call groups than DP-OPT. Selection and population ablations, implementation-level noise checks, and a 200-profile exact-match memorization stress test complement the formal guarantee. Scope: Our experiments establish optimization robustness under DP noise, especially where prompt structure is critical; end-to-end validation on genuinely sensitive, non-saturated deployment data remains future work.