English

Generalized PTR: User-Friendly Recipes for Data-Adaptive Algorithms with Differential Privacy

Machine Learning 2023-01-03 v1

Abstract

The ''Propose-Test-Release'' (PTR) framework is a classic recipe for designing differentially private (DP) algorithms that are data-adaptive, i.e. those that add less noise when the input dataset is nice. We extend PTR to a more general setting by privately testing data-dependent privacy losses rather than local sensitivity, hence making it applicable beyond the standard noise-adding mechanisms, e.g. to queries with unbounded or undefined sensitivity. We demonstrate the versatility of generalized PTR using private linear regression as a case study. Additionally, we apply our algorithm to solve an open problem from ''Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE)'' -- privately releasing the entire model with a delicate data-dependent analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.00301,
  title  = {Generalized PTR: User-Friendly Recipes for Data-Adaptive Algorithms with Differential Privacy},
  author = {Rachel Redberg and Yuqing Zhu and Yu-Xiang Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.00301},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:58:29.344Z