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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

Machine learning (ML) algorithms rely primarily on the availability of training data, and, depending on the domain, these data may include sensitive information about the data providers, thus leading to significant privacy issues.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Karima Makhlouf , Tamara Stefanovic , Heber H. Arcolezi , Catuscia Palamidessi

Pointwise maximal leakage (PML) is a per-outcome privacy measure based on threat models from quantitative information flow. Privacy guarantees with PML rely on knowledge about the distribution that generated the private data. In this work,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Leonhard Grosse , Sara Saeidian , Mikael Skoglund , Tobias J. Oechtering

This paper focuses on the privacy paradigm of providing access to researchers to remotely carry out analyses on sensitive data stored behind firewalls. We address the situation where the analysis demands data from multiple physically…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-20 Joshua Snoke , Timothy R. Brick , Aleksandra Slavkovic , Michael D. Hunter

Estimating mutual information between continuous random variables is often intractable and extremely challenging for high-dimensional data. Recent progress has leveraged neural networks to optimize variational lower bounds on mutual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Ruizhi Liao , Daniel Moyer , Polina Golland , William M. Wells

We revisit the problem of Gaussian mean testing in a distributed, communication constrained setting, where each of $n$ users independently observes samples from an unknown $d$-dimensional spherical Gaussian distribution…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Clément L. Canonne , Nimitt

This paper studies the problem of finding the median of N distinct numbers distributed across networked agents. Each agent updates its estimate for the median from noisy local observations of one of the N numbers and information from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-12 Shuhua Yu , Yuan Chen , Soummya Kar

In recent years, local differential privacy (LDP) has emerged as a technique of choice for privacy-preserving data collection in several scenarios when the aggregator is not trustworthy. LDP provides client-side privacy by adding noise at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-28 Tejas Kulkarni , Joonas Jälkö , Samuel Kaski , Antti Honkela

Differential privacy is typically studied in the central model where a trusted "aggregator" holds the sensitive data of all the individuals and is responsible for protecting their privacy. A popular alternative is the local model in which…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-09-14 Thomas Steinke

Recent research in differential privacy demonstrated that (sub)sampling can amplify the level of protection. For example, for $\epsilon$-differential privacy and simple random sampling with sampling rate $r$, the actual privacy guarantee is…

Applications · Statistics 2022-02-22 Jingchen Hu , Joerg Drechsler , Hang J. Kim

We present a method for producing unbiased parameter estimates and valid confidence intervals under the constraints of differential privacy, a formal framework for limiting individual information leakage from sensitive data. Prior work in…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-15 Christian Covington , Xi He , James Honaker , Gautam Kamath

We study goodness-of-fit and independence testing of discrete distributions in a setting where samples are distributed across multiple users. The users wish to preserve the privacy of their data while enabling a central server to perform…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-01-21 Jayadev Acharya , Clément L. Canonne , Cody Freitag , Ziteng Sun , Himanshu Tyagi

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

We study the problem of online conditional distribution estimation with \emph{unbounded} label sets under local differential privacy. Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a distribution-valued function class with unbounded label set. We aim at estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Jin Sima , Changlong Wu , Olgica Milenkovic , Wojciech Szpankowski

This work proposes an algorithmic method to verify differential privacy for estimation mechanisms with performance guarantees. Differential privacy makes it hard to distinguish outputs of a mechanism produced by adjacent inputs. While…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-12-03 Yunhai Han , Sonia Martínez

Differential privacy has become a widely accepted notion of privacy, leading to the introduction and deployment of numerous privatization mechanisms. However, ensuring the privacy guarantee is an error-prone process, both in designing…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-27 Xiyang Liu , Sewoong Oh

In this paper, we investigate the problem of differentially private distributed optimization. Recognizing that lower sensitivity leads to higher accuracy, we analyze the key factors influencing the sensitivity of differentially private…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-05 Furan Xie , Bing Liu , Li Chai

In this work, we give efficient algorithms for privately estimating a Gaussian distribution in both pure and approximate differential privacy (DP) models with optimal dependence on the dimension in the sample complexity. In the pure DP…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Daniel Alabi , Pravesh K. Kothari , Pranay Tankala , Prayaag Venkat , Fred Zhang

We present two sample-efficient differentially private mean estimators for $d$-dimensional (sub)Gaussian distributions with unknown covariance. Informally, given $n \gtrsim d/\alpha^2$ samples from such a distribution with mean $\mu$ and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Gavin Brown , Marco Gaboardi , Adam Smith , Jonathan Ullman , Lydia Zakynthinou

We show a new lower bound on the sample complexity of $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differentially private algorithms that accurately answer statistical queries on high-dimensional databases. The novelty of our bound is that it depends optimally…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-01-27 Thomas Steinke , Jonathan Ullman