A Locally Differential Private Coding-Assisted Succinct Histogram Protocol

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Hsuan-Po, Mahdavifar, Hessam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Hsuan-Po
Mahdavifar, Hessam
author_facet Liu, Hsuan-Po
Mahdavifar, Hessam
contents A succinct histogram captures frequent items and their frequencies across clients and has become increasingly important for large-scale, privacy-sensitive machine learning applications. To develop a rigorous framework to guarantee privacy for the succinct histogram problem, local differential privacy (LDP) has been utilized and shown promising results. To preserve data utility under LDP, which essentially works by intentionally adding noise to data, error-correcting codes naturally emerge as a promising tool for reliable information collection. This work presents the first practical $(ε,δ)$-LDP protocol for constructing succinct histograms using error-correcting codes. To this end, polar codes and their successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithms are leveraged as the underlying coding scheme. More specifically, our protocol introduces Gaussian-based perturbations to enable efficient soft decoding. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior methods, particularly for items with low true frequencies, while maintaining similar frequency estimation accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17767
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Locally Differential Private Coding-Assisted Succinct Histogram Protocol
Liu, Hsuan-Po
Mahdavifar, Hessam
Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
A succinct histogram captures frequent items and their frequencies across clients and has become increasingly important for large-scale, privacy-sensitive machine learning applications. To develop a rigorous framework to guarantee privacy for the succinct histogram problem, local differential privacy (LDP) has been utilized and shown promising results. To preserve data utility under LDP, which essentially works by intentionally adding noise to data, error-correcting codes naturally emerge as a promising tool for reliable information collection. This work presents the first practical $(ε,δ)$-LDP protocol for constructing succinct histograms using error-correcting codes. To this end, polar codes and their successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithms are leveraged as the underlying coding scheme. More specifically, our protocol introduces Gaussian-based perturbations to enable efficient soft decoding. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior methods, particularly for items with low true frequencies, while maintaining similar frequency estimation accuracy.
title A Locally Differential Private Coding-Assisted Succinct Histogram Protocol
topic Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17767