Zhongzheng Xiong

Zhongzheng Xiong, Xiaoyi Zhu, Zengfeng Huang

We study the distributed tracking model, also known as distributed functional monitoring. This model involves $k$ sites each receiving a stream of items and communicating with the central server. The server's task is to track a function of all items received thus far continuously, with minimum communication cost. For count tracking, it is known that there is a $\sqrt{k}$ gap in communication between deterministic and randomized algorithms. However, existing randomized algorithms assume an "oblivious adversary" who constructs the entire input streams before the algorithm starts. Here we consider adaptive adversaries who can choose new items based on previous answers from the algorithm. Deterministic algorithms are trivially robust to adaptive adversaries, while randomized ones may not. Therefore, we investigate whether the $\sqrt{k}$ advantage of randomized algorithms is from randomness itself or the oblivious adversary assumption. We provide an affirmative answer to this question by giving a robust algorithm with optimal communication. Existing robustification techniques do not yield optimal bounds due to the inherent challenges of the distributed nature of the problem. To address this, we extend the differential privacy framework by introducing "partial differential privacy" and proving a new generalization theorem. This theorem may have broader applications beyond robust count tracking, making it of independent interest.

Zhongzheng Xiong, Jialin Sun, Xiaojun Mao et al.

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 privately. In this paper, we consider the problem of discrete distribution estimation under local differential privacy constraints. Distribution estimation is one of the most fundamental estimation problems, which is widely studied in both non-private and private settings. In the local model, private mechanisms with provably optimal sample complexity are known. However, they are optimal only in the worst-case sense; their sample complexity is proportional to the size of the entire universe, which could be huge in practice. In this paper, we consider sparse or approximately sparse (e.g.\ highly skewed) distribution, and show that the number of samples needed could be significantly reduced. This problem has been studied recently \cite{acharya2021estimating}, but they only consider strict sparse distributions and the high privacy regime. We propose new privatization mechanisms based on compressive sensing. Our methods work for approximately sparse distributions and medium privacy, and have optimal sample and communication complexity.