Preserving Target Distributions With Differentially Private Count Mechanisms
Hey there, little explorer! Imagine you have a big box of your favorite toys, like cars, blocks, and teddy bears.
Sometimes, grown-ups want to know how many cars you have, or how many blocks. But they also want to keep your special secrets safe, like which toy is your absolute favorite!
This grown-up paper is like a super-smart game designer. They found a new, clever way to count your toys (like cars and blocks) so they get the right number, but still keep your secret safe. It's like they whisper the numbers, but never tell anyone exactly which toy belongs to you!
This new game helps them count better and faster, like magic, while still being super careful with everyone's secrets. Yay for safe counting!
arXiv:2604.01468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differentially private mechanisms are increasingly used to publish tables of counts, where each entry represents the number of individuals belonging to a particular category. A distribution of counts summarizes the information in the count column, unlinking counts from categories. This object is useful for answering a class of research questions, but it is subject to statistical biases when counts are privatized with standard mechanisms. This motivates a novel design criterion we term accuracy of distribution. This study formalizes a two-stage framework for privatizing tables of counts that balances accuracy of distribution with two standard criteria of accuracy of counts and runtime. In the first stage, a distribution privatizer generates an
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Differentially private mechanisms are increasingly used to publish tables of counts, where each entry represents the number of individuals belonging to a particular category. A distribution of counts summarizes the information in the count column, unlinking counts from categories. This object is useful for answering a class of research questions, but it is subject to statistical biases when counts are privatized with standard mechanisms. This motivates a novel design criterion we term accuracy of distribution. This study formalizes a two-stage framework for privatizing tables of counts that balances accuracy of distribution with two standard criteria of accuracy of counts and runtime. In the first stage, a distribution privatizer generates an estimate for the true distribution of counts. We introduce a new mechanism, called the cyclic Laplace, specifically tailored to distributions of counts, that outperforms existing general-purpose differentially private histogram mechanisms. In the second stage, a constructor algorithm generates a count mechanism, represented as a transition matrix, whose fixed-point is the privatized distribution of counts. We develop a mathematical theory that describes such transition matrices in terms of simple building blocks we call epsilon-scales. This theory informs the design of a new constructor algorithm that generates transition matrices with favorable properties more efficiently than standard optimization algorithms. We explore the practicality of our framework with a set of experiments, highlighting situations in which a fixed-point method provides a favorable tradeoff among performance criteria.
Comments: 2026.2 PoPETS
Subjects:
Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as: arXiv:2604.01468 [cs.CR]
(or arXiv:2604.01468v1 [cs.CR] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.01468
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Nitin Kohli [view email] [v1] Wed, 1 Apr 2026 23:25:05 UTC (1,082 KB)
Sign in to highlight and annotate this article
Conversation starters
Daily AI Digest
Get the top 5 AI stories delivered to your inbox every morning.
More about
announcestudyarxiv
Silverback AI Chatbot Announces Development of AI Assistant Feature to Support Automated Digital Interaction and Workflow Management - Corpus Christi Caller-Times
Silverback AI Chatbot Announces Development of AI Assistant Feature to Support Automated Digital Interaction and Workflow Management Corpus Christi Caller-Times
Knowledge Map
Connected Articles — Knowledge Graph
This article is connected to other articles through shared AI topics and tags.
More in Research Papers
This Wi-Fi receiver can work inside a nuclear reactor, keeping robots connected
The research, presented at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, shows the receiver can continue operating after exposure to 500 kilograys of radiation. That level of endurance far exceeds what even space-grade electronics are designed to handle. Read Entire Article
Discussion
Sign in to join the discussion
No comments yet — be the first to share your thoughts!