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We initiate the study of hypothesis selection under local differential privacy. Given samples from an unknown probability distribution $p$ and a set of $k$ probability distributions $\mathcal{Q}$, we aim to output, under the constraints of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sivakanth Gopi , Gautam Kamath , Janardhan Kulkarni , Aleksandar Nikolov , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Huanyu Zhang

We study the problem of efficiently generating differentially private synthetic data that approximate the statistical properties of an underlying sensitive dataset. In recent years, there has been a growing line of work that approaches this…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Terrance Liu , Jingwu Tang , Giuseppe Vietri , Zhiwei Steven Wu

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 show that convex-concave Lipschitz stochastic saddle point problems (also known as stochastic minimax optimization) can be solved under the constraint of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy with \emph{strong (primal-dual) gap} rate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Raef Bassily , Cristóbal Guzmán , Michael Menart

Perhaps the single most important use case for differential privacy is to privately answer numerical queries, which is usually achieved by adding noise to the answer vector. The central question, therefore, is to understand which noise…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-17 Jinshuo Dong , Weijie J. Su , Linjun Zhang

Given a dataset of $n$ user-contributed strings, each of length at most $\ell$, a key problem is how to identify all frequent substrings while preserving each user's privacy. Recent work by Bernardini et al. (PODS'25) introduced a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Peaker Guo , Rayne Holland , Hao Wu

We consider the problem of differentially private selection. Given a finite set of candidate items and a quality score for each item, our goal is to design a differentially private mechanism that returns an item with a score that is as high…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Ryan McKenna , Daniel Sheldon

The Gaussian mechanism is one differential privacy mechanism commonly used to protect numerical data. However, it may be ill-suited to some applications because it has unbounded support and thus can produce invalid numerical answers to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Bo Chen , Matthew Hale

We consider online and PAC learning of Littlestone classes subject to the constraint of approximate differential privacy. Our main result is a private learner to online-learn a Littlestone class with a mistake bound of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-02 Xin Lyu

We consider online learning problems in the realizable setting, where there is a zero-loss solution, and propose new Differentially Private (DP) algorithms that obtain near-optimal regret bounds. For the problem of online prediction from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Hilal Asi , Vitaly Feldman , Tomer Koren , Kunal Talwar

A differentially private selection algorithm outputs from a finite set the item that approximately maximizes a data-dependent quality function. The most widely adopted mechanisms tackling this task are the pioneering exponential mechanism…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Gonzalo Munilla Garrido , Florian Matthes

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

Differential privacy provides a rigorous framework to quantify data privacy, and has received considerable interest recently. A randomized mechanism satisfying $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy (DP) roughly means that, except with a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Jun Zhao , Teng Wang , Tao Bai , Kwok-Yan Lam , Zhiying Xu , Shuyu Shi , Xuebin Ren , Xinyu Yang , Yang Liu , Han Yu

We present an improved $(\epsilon, \delta)$-jointly differentially private algorithm for packing problems. Our algorithm gives a feasible output that is approximately optimal up to an $\alpha n$ additive factor as long as the supply of each…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-05-03 Zhiyi Huang , Xue Zhu

We present a simple perturbation mechanism for the release of $d$-dimensional covariance matrices $\Sigma$ under pure differential privacy. For large datasets with at least $n\geq d^2/\varepsilon$ elements, our mechanism recovers the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Tommaso d'Orsi , Gleb Novikov

In this note, we present a simple differentially private algorithm for the global minimum cut problem using only one call to the exponential mechanism. This problem was first studied by Gupta et al. [2010], and they gave a differentially…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-08-24 George Z. Li

Sparse histogram methods can be useful for returning differentially private counts of items in large or infinite histograms, large group-by queries, and more generally, releasing a set of statistics with sufficient item counts. We consider…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Brian Karrer , Daniel Kifer , Arjun Wilkins , Danfeng Zhang

We provide a new algorithmic framework for differentially private estimation of general functions that adapts to the hardness of the underlying dataset. We build upon previous work that gives a paradigm for selecting an output through the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-28 David Durfee

Gaussian elimination (GE) is the archetypal direct algorithm for solving linear systems of equations and this has been its primary application for thousands of years. In the last decade, GE has found another major use as an iterative…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-02-23 Alex Townsend

Report Noisy Max and Above Threshold are two classical differentially private (DP) selection mechanisms. Their output is obtained by adding noise to a sequence of low-sensitivity queries and reporting the identity of the query whose (noisy)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Jonathan Lebensold , Doina Precup , Borja Balle