arXiv Machine Learning

Decoupled Learning and Selection in Slate Recommendation for Privacy and Stability Under Noisy Scores

The paper formalizes slate recommendation as a two-stage process: a randomized score learner followed by deterministic selection. It shows that a differential‑privacy guarantee can be preserved through the selection stage when selector inputs are public or independent, and introduces a logged margin certificate that bounds score‑induced objective changes, ensuring the slate order remains stable. Experiments on OULAD, MovieLens‑25M, and Amazon Musical Instruments demonstrate that higher anchor weight reduces ranking churn, while simulations confirm bounded target drift and utility dependent on settings.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Privacy Without Regret: Differentially Private Inference-Time Alignment

The paper introduces Private Best-of-N (PrivBoN), a method that adds calibrated Gumbel noise to reward scores during inference-time alignment, achieving both ε-differential privacy and KL-regularized alignment. When the privacy budget exceeds a critical threshold ε*, the noise becomes regret-optimal, matching the theoretical alignment skyline. The authors also propose Private Inference-Time Pessimism (PrivITP), which uses χ^2-regularized rejection sampling and a two-phase Gaussian mechanism to provide ex-post (ε,δ)-DP with a privacy cost independent of the number of responses, and demonstrate that both methods outperform standard Best-of-N across multiple models and datasets.

By Ishi Jain, Nandini Bhattad, Sayak Ray Chowdhury
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Differentially Private Sparse Reward Estimation with Preference Feedback

The paper introduces a differentially private framework for sparse reward estimation in reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). It assumes that only a small subset of features influences human preferences and provides theoretical error bounds for both Sample-DP and Label-DP settings under the Bradley-Terry-Luce model. Empirical results show that the proposed methods outperform dense baselines on sentiment generation and safety alignment tasks, achieving a better privacy‑utility trade‑off.

By Meng Ding, Mingxi Lei, Jie Zhang, Jinyan Liu, Di Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Let's Ask Gauss: Improved One-Run Privacy Auditing

arXiv:2606. 12733v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Privacy auditing provides an important safeguard by estimating the actual information leaked by a model, thus ensuring that theoretical privacy guarantees hold in practice.

By Adya Agrawal, Yu Wei, Jaspal Singh, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Vassilis Zikas
arXiv AI
Oct 28

Conservative Dueling Bandits: Preference Learning under Baseline Constraints

The paper introduces conservative contextual dueling bandits, which enforce that each displayed item’s cumulative score remains above a specified fraction of a trusted baseline’s score. It presents algorithms—MaxInP-BC for linear utilities and BTIGW-BC for general utilities—that guarantee safety with high probability while achieving sublinear regret. Experiments show these methods satisfy the safety constraint more reliably than unconstrained counterparts, with only a moderate increase in regret.

By Rohan Deb, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Arindam Banerjee
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Certification-Based Differentially Private Learning

The paper extends the abstract gradient training (AGT) framework to provide tighter differential privacy guarantees for both private prediction and private learning. It introduces Abstract Gradient Sampling (AGS) to analyze privacy in continuous, unbounded regression and offers theoretical and empirical evidence that these methods yield tighter bounds than global-sensitivity baselines, even in previously unbounded settings. The authors also demonstrate that their private learning algorithm can outperform standard private learners under comparable conditions.

By Mihnea Ghitu, Matthew Wicker
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 1

IntraShuffler: A Privacy Preserving Framework for Heterogeneous DP Federated Learning

Heterogeneous Differential Privacy (HDP) in Federated Learning (FL) allows clients to select individual privacy budgets ($\varepsilon_i$) according to institutional policies and data sensitivity. In practice, many HDP-FL systems employ $\varepsilon$-aware server aggregation to improve model utility by re-weighting client updates according to their declared privacy budgets.