Differentially Private Sampling from Distributions via Wasserstein Projection
Abstract
In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a distribution under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). Prior works measure the utility of DP sampling with density ratio-based measures such as KL divergence. However, such formulations suffer from two key limitations: 1) they fail to capture the geometric structure of the support, and 2) they are not applicable when the supports of the distributions differ. To deal with these issues, we develop a novel framework for DP sampling with Wasserstein distance as the utility measure. In this formulation, we propose Wasserstein Projection Mechanism (WPM), a minimax optimal mechanism based on Wasserstein projection. Furthermore, we develop efficient algorithms for computing the proposed mechanisms approximately and provide convergence guarantees.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.10015,
title = {Differentially Private Sampling from Distributions via Wasserstein Projection},
author = {Shokichi Takakura and Seng Pei Liew and Satoshi Hasegawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.10015},
year = {2026}
}