English
Related papers

Related papers: Private and polynomial time algorithms for learnin…

200 papers

The Gaussian distribution is widely used in mechanism design for differential privacy (DP). Thanks to its sub-Gaussian tail, it significantly reduces the chance of outliers when responding to queries. However, it can only provide…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Parastoo Sadeghi , Mehdi Korki

We present a fast, differentially private algorithm for high-dimensional covariance-aware mean estimation with nearly optimal sample complexity. Only exponential-time estimators were previously known to achieve this guarantee. Given $n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Gavin Brown , Samuel B. Hopkins , Adam Smith

We present novel, computationally efficient, and differentially private algorithms for two fundamental high-dimensional learning problems: learning a multivariate Gaussian and learning a product distribution over the Boolean hypercube in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Gautam Kamath , Jerry Li , Vikrant Singhal , Jonathan Ullman

Differential privacy (DP) is obtained by randomizing a data analysis algorithm, which necessarily introduces a tradeoff between its utility and privacy. Many DP mechanisms are built upon one of two underlying tools: Laplace and Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Roy Rinberg , Ilia Shumailov , Vikrant Singhal , Rachel Cummings , Nicolas Papernot

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic non-convex optimization. In this problem, the goal is to minimize the population loss over a $p$-dimensional space given $n$ i.i.d. samples drawn from a distribution. We improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Yingxue Zhou , Xiangyi Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Arindam Banerjee

We use the Sum of Squares method to develop new efficient algorithms for learning well-separated mixtures of Gaussians and robust mean estimation, both in high dimensions, that substantially improve upon the statistical guarantees achieved…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Samuel B. Hopkins , Jerry Li

Many applications of machine learning, for example in health care, would benefit from methods that can guarantee privacy of data subjects. Differential privacy (DP) has become established as a standard for protecting learning results. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-30 Mikko Heikkilä , Eemil Lagerspetz , Samuel Kaski , Kana Shimizu , Sasu Tarkoma , Antti Honkela

We introduce general tools for designing efficient private estimation algorithms, in the high-dimensional settings, whose statistical guarantees almost match those of the best known non-private algorithms. To illustrate our techniques, we…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Hongjie Chen , Vincent Cohen-Addad , Tommaso d'Orsi , Alessandro Epasto , Jacob Imola , David Steurer , Stefan Tiegel

We design an $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm to estimate the mean of a $d$-variate distribution, with unknown covariance $\Sigma$, that is adaptive to $\Sigma$. To within polylogarithmic factors, the estimator…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 John Duchi , Saminul Haque , Rohith Kuditipudi

The verification of differential privacy algorithms that employ Gaussian distributions is little understood. This paper tackles the challenge of verifying such programs by introducing a novel approach to approximating probability…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Bishnu Bhusal , Rohit Chadha , A. Prasad Sistla , Mahesh Viswanathan

The Gaussian mechanism is an essential building block used in multitude of differentially private data analysis algorithms. In this paper we revisit the Gaussian mechanism and show that the original analysis has several important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Borja Balle , Yu-Xiang Wang

We study the estimation of distributional parameters when samples are shown only if they fall in some unknown set $S \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$. Kontonis, Tzamos, and Zampetakis (FOCS'19) gave a $d^{\mathrm{poly}(1/\varepsilon)}$ time…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Jane H. Lee , Anay Mehrotra , Manolis Zampetakis

We study mean estimation for Gaussian distributions under \textit{personalized differential privacy} (PDP), where each record has its own privacy budget. PDP is commonly considered in two variants: \textit{bounded} and \textit{unbounded}…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Wei Dong , Li Ge

The discrete Gaussian $D_{L- t, s}$ is the distribution that assigns to each vector $x$ in a shifted lattice $L - t$ probability proportional to $e^{-\pi \|x\|^2/s^2}$. It has long been an important tool in the study of lattices. More…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-01-28 Noah Stephens-Davidowitz

Learning the parameters of Gaussian mixture models is a fundamental and widely studied problem with numerous applications. In this work, we give new algorithms for learning the parameters of a high-dimensional, well separated, Gaussian…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-10-17 Gautam Kamath , Or Sheffet , Vikrant Singhal , Jonathan Ullman

We study the problem of learning exponential distributions under differential privacy. Given $n$ i.i.d.\ samples from $\mathrm{Exp}(\lambda)$, the goal is to privately estimate $\lambda$ so that the learned distribution is close in total…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Bar Mahpud , Or Sheffet

Statistical and machine-learning algorithms are frequently applied to high-dimensional data. In many of these applications data is scarce, and often much more costly than computation time. We provide the first sample-efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-20 Jayadev Acharya , Ashkan Jafarpour , Alon Orlitsky , Ananda Theertha Suresh

Algorithms such as Differentially Private SGD enable training machine learning models with formal privacy guarantees. However, there is a discrepancy between the protection that such algorithms guarantee in theory and the protection they…

We study a basic private estimation problem: each of $n$ users draws a single i.i.d. sample from an unknown Gaussian distribution, and the goal is to estimate the mean of this Gaussian distribution while satisfying local differential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Matthew Joseph , Janardhan Kulkarni , Jieming Mao , Zhiwei Steven Wu

We present the first $\varepsilon$-differentially private, computationally efficient algorithm that estimates the means of product distributions over $\{0,1\}^d$ accurately in total-variation distance, whilst attaining the optimal sample…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Vikrant Singhal