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We study the $\ell_2$ mechanism for computing a $d$-dimensional statistic with bounded $\ell_2$ sensitivity under approximate differential privacy. Across a range of privacy parameters, we find that the $\ell_2$ mechanism obtains lower…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Matthew Joseph , Alex Kulesza , Alexander Yu

We consider the problem of mean estimation under user-level local differential privacy, where $n$ users are contributing through their local pool of data samples. Previous work assume that the number of data samples is the same across…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-15 Corentin Pla , Hugo Richard , Maxime Vono

To reduce the communication cost of differential privacy mechanisms, we introduce a novel construction, called Poisson private representation (PPR), designed to compress and simulate any local randomizer while ensuring local differential…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Yanxiao Liu , Wei-Ning Chen , Ayfer Özgür , Cheuk Ting Li

We consider machine learning, particularly regression, using locally-differentially private datasets. The Wasserstein distance is used to define an ambiguity set centered at the empirical distribution of the dataset corrupted by local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Farhad Farokhi

Many resource allocation problems can be formulated as an optimization problem whose constraints contain sensitive information about participating users. This paper concerns solving this kind of optimization problem in a distributed manner…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-11-17 Shuo Han , Ufuk Topcu , George J. Pappas

We study differentially private stochastic optimization in convex and non-convex settings. For the convex case, we focus on the family of non-smooth generalized linear losses (GLLs). Our algorithm for the $\ell_2$ setting achieves optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Raef Bassily , Cristóbal Guzmán , Michael Menart

Differential privacy is a restriction on data processing algorithms that provides strong confidentiality guarantees for individual records in the data. However, research on proper statistical inference, that is, research on properly…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Joerg Drechsler , Ira Globus-Harris , Audra McMillan , Jayshree Sarathy , Adam Smith

Bayesian methods lie at the heart of modern data science and provide a powerful scaffolding for estimation in data-constrained settings and principled quantification and propagation of uncertainty. Yet in many real-world use cases where…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Sitan Chen , Jingqiu Ding , Mahbod Majid , Walter McKelvie

We consider the problem of privately estimating a parameter $\mathbb{E}[h(X_1,\dots,X_k)]$, where $X_1$, $X_2$, $\dots$, $X_k$ are i.i.d. data from some distribution and $h$ is a permutation-invariant function. Without privacy constraints,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-07-09 Kamalika Chaudhuri , Po-Ling Loh , Shourya Pandey , Purnamrita Sarkar

Recent years, local differential privacy (LDP) has been adopted by many web service providers like Google \cite{erlingsson2014rappor}, Apple \cite{apple2017privacy} and Microsoft \cite{bolin2017telemetry} to collect and analyse users' data…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Zhongzheng Xiong , Jialin Sun , Xiaojun Mao , Jian Wang , Shan Ying , Zengfeng Huang

Safeguarding privacy in machine learning is highly desirable, especially in collaborative studies across many organizations. Privacy-preserving distributed machine learning (based on cryptography) is popular to solve the problem. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-07 Wei Xie , Yang Wang , Steven M. Boker , Donald E. Brown

We study the classical problem of community recovery in stochastic block models with a fixed number of communities, with a twist: We seek algorithms that are stable with respect to node-wise changes in the graph structure, formally defined…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-18 Laurentiu Marchis , Ethan D'souza , Tomáš Flídr , Po-Ling Loh

We study the problem of differentially private continual counting in the unbounded setting where the input size $n$ is not known in advance. Current state-of-the-art algorithms based on optimal instantiations of the matrix mechanism cannot…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ben Jacobsen , Kassem Fawaz

Local differential privacy is a promising privacy-preserving model for statistical aggregation of user data that prevents user privacy leakage from the data aggregator. This paper focuses on the problem of estimating the distribution of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Ba Dung Le , Tanveer Zia

Through the lens of information-theoretic reductions, we examine a reductions approach to fair optimization and learning where a black-box optimizer is used to learn a fair model for classification or regression. Quantifying the complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Daniel Alabi

We study differentially private mean estimation in a high-dimensional setting. Existing differential privacy techniques applied to large dimensions lead to computationally intractable problems or estimators with excessive privacy loss.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Aditya Dhar , Jason Huang

We study the problem of sampling from a distribution under local differential privacy (LDP). Given a private distribution $P \in \mathcal{P}$, the goal is to generate a single sample from a distribution that remains close to $P$ in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Hrad Ghoukasian , Bonwoo Lee , Shahab Asoodeh

This paper focuses on the privacy-preserving distributed estimation problem with a limited data rate, where the observations are the sensitive information. Specifically, a binary-valued quantizer-based privacy-preserving distributed…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-13 Jieming Ke , Jimin Wang , Ji-Feng Zhang

Economics and social science research often require analyzing datasets of sensitive personal information at fine granularity, with models fit to small subsets of the data. Unfortunately, such fine-grained analysis can easily reveal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-13 Daniel Alabi , Audra McMillan , Jayshree Sarathy , Adam Smith , Salil Vadhan

Privacy and communication constraints are two major bottlenecks in federated learning (FL) and analytics (FA). We study the optimal accuracy of mean and frequency estimation (canonical models for FL and FA respectively) under joint…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-05 Wei-Ning Chen , Dan Song , Ayfer Ozgur , Peter Kairouz