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Related papers: Continual Mean Estimation Under User-Level Privacy

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Much of the literature on differential privacy focuses on item-level privacy, where loosely speaking, the goal is to provide privacy per item or training example. However, recently many practical applications such as federated learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Yuhan Liu , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Felix Yu , Sanjiv Kumar , Michael Riley

Differential Privacy (DP) provides an elegant mathematical framework for defining a provable disclosure risk in the presence of arbitrary adversaries; it guarantees that whether an individual is in a database or not, the results of a DP…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Aleksandra Slavkovic , Roberto Molinari

Differentially private (DP) language model inference is an approach for generating private synthetic text. A sensitive input example is used to prompt an off-the-shelf large language model (LLM) to produce a similar example. Multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Kareem Amin , Salman Avestimehr , Sara Babakniya , Alex Bie , Weiwei Kong , Natalia Ponomareva , Umar Syed

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

Differential privacy (DP) enables private data analysis. In a typical DP deployment, controllers manage individuals' sensitive data and are responsible for answering analysts' queries while protecting individuals' privacy. They do so by…

Databases · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Zhiru Zhu , Raul Castro Fernandez

We initiate the study of language generation in the limit, a model recently introduced by Kleinberg and Mullainathan [KM24], under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider the continual release model, where a generator must…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-10 Anay Mehrotra , Grigoris Velegkas , Xifan Yu , Felix Zhou

Large organizations that collect data about populations (like the US Census Bureau) release summary statistics that are used by multiple stakeholders for resource allocation and policy making problems. These organizations are also legally…

Databases · Computer Science 2021-11-08 David Pujol , Yikai Wu , Brandon Fain , Ashwin Machanavajjhala

An algorithm is developed to gradually relax the Differential Privacy (DP) guarantee of a randomized response. The output from each relaxation maintains the same probability distribution as a standard randomized response with the equivalent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Mingen Pan

We study the problem of differentially private query release assisted by access to public data. In this problem, the goal is to answer a large class $\mathcal{H}$ of statistical queries with error no more than $\alpha$ using a combination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-24 Raef Bassily , Albert Cheu , Shay Moran , Aleksandar Nikolov , Jonathan Ullman , Zhiwei Steven Wu

With local differential privacy (LDP), users can privatize their data and thus guarantee privacy properties before transmitting it to the server (a.k.a. the aggregator). One primary objective of LDP is frequency (or histogram) estimation,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Héber H. Arcolezi , Jean-François Couchot , Bechara Al Bouna , Xiaokui Xiao

We consider the task of producing heatmaps from users' aggregated data while protecting their privacy. We give a differentially private (DP) algorithm for this task and demonstrate its advantages over previous algorithms on real-world…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Badih Ghazi , Junfeng He , Kai Kohlhoff , Ravi Kumar , Pasin Manurangsi , Vidhya Navalpakkam , Nachiappan Valliappan

We study the fundamental problem of frequency estimation under both privacy and communication constraints, where the data is distributed among $k$ parties. We consider two application scenarios: (1) one-shot, where the data is static and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Ziyue Huang , Yuan Qiu , Ke Yi , Graham Cormode

Differential Privacy (DP) is a widely adopted standard for privacy-preserving data analysis, but it assumes a uniform privacy budget across all records, limiting its applicability when privacy requirements vary with data values. Per-record…

Databases · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Xinghe Chen , Dajun Sun , Quanqing Xu , Wei Dong

Although the NLP community has adopted central differential privacy as a go-to framework for privacy-preserving model training or data sharing, the choice and interpretation of the key parameter, privacy budget $\varepsilon$ that governs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Christopher Weiss , Frauke Kreuter , Ivan Habernal

Sharing health and behavioral data raises significant privacy concerns, as conventional de-identification methods are susceptible to privacy attacks. Differential Privacy (DP) provides formal guarantees against re-identification risks, but…

Constructing a differentially private (DP) estimator requires deriving the maximum influence of an observation, which can be difficult in the absence of exogenous bounds on the input data or the estimator, especially in high dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-27 Ryan Cumings-Menon

We consider a platform's problem of collecting data from privacy sensitive users to estimate an underlying parameter of interest. We formulate this question as a Bayesian-optimal mechanism design problem, in which an individual can share…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Alireza Fallah , Ali Makhdoumi , Azarakhsh Malekian , Asuman Ozdaglar

Background: Synthetic data has been proposed as a solution for sharing anonymized versions of sensitive biomedical datasets. Ideally, synthetic data should preserve the structure and statistical properties of the original data, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Ileana Montoya Perez , Parisa Movahedi , Valtteri Nieminen , Antti Airola , Tapio Pahikkala

Mean estimation under differential privacy is a fundamental problem, but worst-case optimal mechanisms do not offer meaningful utility guarantees in practice when the global sensitivity is very large. Instead, various heuristics have been…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Ziyue Huang , Yuting Liang , Ke Yi

This work considers the problem of Distributed Mean Estimation (DME) over networks with intermittent connectivity, where the goal is to learn a global statistic over the data samples localized across distributed nodes with the help of a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Rajarshi Saha , Mohamed Seif , Michal Yemini , Andrea J. Goldsmith , H. Vincent Poor