Quan Geng

Ruiqi Guo, Philip Sun, Erik Lindgren et al.

Quantization based techniques are the current state-of-the-art for scaling maximum inner product search to massive databases. Traditional approaches to quantization aim to minimize the reconstruction error of the database points. Based on the observation that for a given query, the database points that have the largest inner products are more relevant, we develop a family of anisotropic quantization loss functions. Under natural statistical assumptions, we show that quantization with these loss functions leads to a new variant of vector quantization that more greatly penalizes the parallel component of a datapoint's residual relative to its orthogonal component. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the public benchmarks available at \url{ann-benchmarks.com}.

Quan Geng, Wei Ding, Ruiqi Guo et al.

We characterize the minimum noise amplitude and power for noise-adding mechanisms in $(ε, δ)$-differential privacy for single real-valued query function. We derive new lower bounds using the duality of linear programming, and new upper bounds by proposing a new class of $(ε,δ)$-differentially private mechanisms, the \emph{truncated Laplacian} mechanisms. We show that the multiplicative gap of the lower bounds and upper bounds goes to zero in various high privacy regimes, proving the tightness of the lower and upper bounds and thus establishing the optimality of the truncated Laplacian mechanism. In particular, our results close the previous constant multiplicative gap in the discrete setting. Numeric experiments show the improvement of the truncated Laplacian mechanism over the optimal Gaussian mechanism in all privacy regimes.

Quan Geng, Wei Ding, Ruiqi Guo et al.

We derive the optimal $(0, δ)$-differentially private query-output independent noise-adding mechanism for single real-valued query function under a general cost-minimization framework. Under a mild technical condition, we show that the optimal noise probability distribution is a uniform distribution with a probability mass at the origin. We explicitly derive the optimal noise distribution for general $\ell^p$ cost functions, including $\ell^1$ (for noise magnitude) and $\ell^2$ (for noise power) cost functions, and show that the probability concentration on the origin occurs when $δ> \frac{p}{p+1}$. Our result demonstrates an improvement over the existing Gaussian mechanisms by a factor of two and three for $(0,δ)$-differential privacy in the high privacy regime in the context of minimizing the noise magnitude and noise power, and the gain is more pronounced in the low privacy regime. Our result is consistent with the existing result for $(0,δ)$-differential privacy in the discrete setting, and identifies a probability concentration phenomenon in the continuous setting.

Quan Geng, Pramod Viswanath

We derive the optimal $ε$-differentially private mechanism for a general two-dimensional real-valued (histogram-like) query function under a utility-maximization (or cost-minimization) framework for the $\ell^1$ cost function. We show that the optimal noise probability distribution has a correlated multidimensional staircase-shaped probability density function. Compared with the Laplacian mechanism, we show that in the high privacy regime (as $ε\to 0$), the Laplacian mechanism is approximately optimal; and in the low privacy regime (as $ε\to +\infty$), the optimal cost is $Θ(e^{-\fracε{3}})$, while the cost of the Laplacian mechanism is $\frac{2Δ}ε$, where $Δ$ is the sensitivity of the query function. We conclude that the gain is more pronounced in the low privacy regime. We conjecture that the optimality of the staircase mechanism holds for vector-valued (histogram-like) query functions with arbitrary dimension, and holds for many other classes of cost functions as well.

Quan Geng, Pramod Viswanath

We study the (nearly) optimal mechanisms in $(ε,δ)$-approximate differential privacy for integer-valued query functions and vector-valued (histogram-like) query functions under a utility-maximization/cost-minimization framework. We characterize the tradeoff between $ε$ and $δ$ in utility and privacy analysis for histogram-like query functions ($\ell^1$ sensitivity), and show that the $(ε,δ)$-differential privacy is a framework not much more general than the $(ε,0)$-differential privacy and $(0,δ)$-differential privacy in the context of $\ell^1$ and $\ell^2$ cost functions, i.e., minimum expected noise magnitude and noise power. In the same context of $\ell^1$ and $\ell^2$ cost functions, we show the near-optimality of uniform noise mechanism and discrete Laplacian mechanism in the high privacy regime (as $(ε,δ) \to (0,0)$). We conclude that in $(ε,δ)$-differential privacy, the optimal noise magnitude and noise power are $Θ(\min(\frac{1}ε,\frac{1}δ))$ and $Θ(\min(\frac{1}{ε^2},\frac{1}{δ^2}))$, respectively, in the high privacy regime.