LAPRAS : Learning-Augmented PRivate Answering for linear query Streams
Abstract
Modern database workloads are highly predictable: query streams are dominated by recurring jobs and templates, even when their arrival order is not known in advance. This motivates a learning-augmented view of online differentially private (DP) analytics: can algorithms utilize predictions about which queries will occur to improve utility under a single global privacy budget, while remaining robust when predictions are wrong? We study online DP query answering, where a curator must answer a stream of linear queries arriving in uniformly random order under privacy budget . We present LAPRAS, which assumes access to an oracle that outputs a prediction set of queries likely to appear in the stream and uses it to guide privacy spending. LAPRAS answers predicted queries using the offline-optimal Matrix Mechanism and answers the remaining queries online from a residual budget. To pace spending across an unknown number of unpredicted queries, we introduce Smooth Allocation, which forms an unbiased stopping-time estimate from the first unpredicted queries and continuously recalibrates per-query expenditure. Empirically, over two real datasets, we validate the intended consistency--robustness trade-off: LAPRAS achieves near-offline utility under high overlap and degrades gracefully to baseline-level performance when overlap is low.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.01960,
title = {LAPRAS : Learning-Augmented PRivate Answering for linear query Streams},
author = {Pranay Mundra and Adam Sealfon and Ziteng Sun and Quanquan C. Liu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01960},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
To appear in ICML 2026