Related papers: Beyond Random Noise: Insights on Anonymization Str…

Voting plays a central role in bringing crowd wisdom to collective decision making, meanwhile data privacy has been a common ethical/legal issue in eliciting preferences from individuals. This work studies the problem of aggregating…

Bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for interactive recommendation. However, as such algorithms directly interact with users for improved recommendations, serious privacy concerns have been raised regarding its practical use.…

In the post-industrial world, data science and analytics have gained paramount importance regarding digital data privacy. Improper methods of establishing privacy for accessible datasets can compromise large amounts of user data even if the…

There is a disconnect between how researchers and practitioners handle privacy-utility tradeoffs. Researchers primarily operate from a privacy first perspective, setting strict privacy requirements and minimizing risk subject to these…

Federated learning, in which training data is distributed among users and never shared, has emerged as a popular approach to privacy-preserving machine learning. Cryptographic techniques such as secure aggregation are used to aggregate…

The calibration of noise for a privacy-preserving mechanism depends on the sensitivity of the query and the prescribed privacy level. A data steward must make the non-trivial choice of a privacy level that balances the requirements of users…

We propose the first method that realizes the Laplace mechanism exactly (i.e., a Laplace noise is added to the data) that requires only a finite amount of communication (whereas the original Laplace mechanism requires the transmission of a…

Data that is gathered adaptively --- via bandit algorithms, for example --- exhibits bias. This is true both when gathering simple numeric valued data --- the empirical means kept track of by stochastic bandit algorithms are biased…

We study the privacy risks that are associated with training a neural network's weights with self-supervised learning algorithms. Through empirical evidence, we show that the fine-tuning stage, in which the network weights are updated with…

In 2011 Bhaskar et al. pointed out that in many cases one can ensure sufficient level of privacy without adding noise by utilizing adversarial uncertainty. Informally speaking, this observation comes from the fact that if at least a part of…

How should one combine noisy information from diverse sources to make an inference about an objective ground truth? This frequently recurring, normative question lies at the core of statistics, machine learning, policy-making, and everyday…

Data privacy is an important concern in machine learning, and is fundamentally at odds with the task of training useful learning models, which typically require the acquisition of large amounts of private user data. One possible way of…

We study distributed estimation and learning problems in a networked environment where agents exchange information to estimate unknown statistical properties of random variables from their privately observed samples. The agents can…

In this work, we present and study a new framework for online learning in systems with multiple users that provide user anonymity. Specifically, we extend the notion of bandits to obey the standard $k$-anonymity constraint by requiring each…

This paper proposes a locally differentially private federated learning algorithm for strongly convex but possibly nonsmooth problems that protects the gradients of each worker against an honest but curious server. The proposed algorithm…

Large-scale network data can pose computational challenges, be expensive to acquire, and compromise the privacy of individuals in social networks. We show that the locations and scales of latent space cluster models can be inferred from the…

In a data-centric era, concerns regarding privacy and ethical data handling grow as machine learning relies more on personal information. This empirical study investigates the privacy, generalization, and stability of deep learning models…

We focus on two mainstream privacy models: k-anonymity and differential privacy. Once a privacy model has been selected, the goal is to enforce it while preserving as much data utility as possible. The main objective of this thesis is to…

Local differential privacy is a differential privacy paradigm in which individuals first apply a privacy mechanism to their data (often by adding noise) before transmitting the result to a curator. The noise for privacy results in…

Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…