English

R\'enyi Pufferfish Privacy with Gaussian-based Priors: From Single Gaussian to Mixture Model

Cryptography and Security 2026-04-28 v1

Abstract

R\'{e}nyi Pufferfish Privacy (RPP) provides a R\'{e}nyi divergence-based privacy framework for correlated data, but existing \infty-Wasserstein mechanisms are often conservative and sacrifice data utility. We study Gaussian mechanisms for RPP under Gaussian and Gaussian-mixture priors. For single Gaussian priors, we derive the exact R\'{e}nyi divergence after Gaussian perturbation, obtain a relaxed closed-form sufficient condition for (α,ϵ)(\alpha,\epsilon)-RPP, and characterize the monotonicity of the calibrated noise with respect to the privacy budget ϵ\epsilon and the R\'{e}nyi order α\alpha. To handle more general non-Gaussian and multimodal priors, we approximate secret-conditioned outputs with Gaussian mixture models and introduce an optimal-transport-based sufficient condition for RPP. Experiments on three UCI datasets with statistical (\textsc{RAW}, \textsc{MEAN}) and model-output (\textsc{BNN}, \textsc{GP}) queries show that our prior-aware mechanisms consistently require less noise than a recent RPP additive-noise baseline, achieving an average noise reduction of 48.9\%. These results show that our mechanisms can substantially improve the privacy-utility trade-off under RPP.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.23649,
  title  = {R\'enyi Pufferfish Privacy with Gaussian-based Priors: From Single Gaussian to Mixture Model},
  author = {Wenjin Yang and Ni Ding and Zijian Zhang and Zhen Li and Jing Sun and Jincheng An and Yong Liu and Liehuang Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.23649},
  year   = {2026}
}