Reconstruction and Secrecy under Approximate Distance Queries

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Moran, Shay, Nesterova, Elizaveta
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Moran, Shay
Nesterova, Elizaveta
author_facet Moran, Shay
Nesterova, Elizaveta
contents Consider the task of locating an unknown target point using approximate distance queries: in each round, a reconstructor selects a query point and receives a noisy version of its distance to the target. This problem arises naturally in various contexts ranging from localization in GPS and sensor networks to privacy-aware data access, and spans a wide variety of metric spaces. It is relevant from the perspective of both the reconstructor (seeking accurate recovery) and the responder (aiming to limit information disclosure, e.g., for privacy or security reasons). We study this reconstruction game through a learning-theoretic lens, focusing on the rate and limits of the best possible reconstruction error. Our first result provides a tight geometric characterization of the optimal error in terms of the Chebyshev radius, a classical concept from geometry. This characterization applies to all compact metric spaces (in fact, even to all totally bounded spaces) and yields explicit formulas for natural metric spaces. Our second result addresses the asymptotic behavior of reconstruction, distinguishing between pseudo-finite spaces -- where the optimal error is attained after finitely many queries -- and spaces where the approximation curve exhibits nontrivial decay. We characterize pseudo-finiteness for convex Euclidean spaces.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06461
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reconstruction and Secrecy under Approximate Distance Queries
Moran, Shay
Nesterova, Elizaveta
Machine Learning
Information Theory
Metric Geometry
I.2.6; H.2.7; K.4.1
Consider the task of locating an unknown target point using approximate distance queries: in each round, a reconstructor selects a query point and receives a noisy version of its distance to the target. This problem arises naturally in various contexts ranging from localization in GPS and sensor networks to privacy-aware data access, and spans a wide variety of metric spaces. It is relevant from the perspective of both the reconstructor (seeking accurate recovery) and the responder (aiming to limit information disclosure, e.g., for privacy or security reasons). We study this reconstruction game through a learning-theoretic lens, focusing on the rate and limits of the best possible reconstruction error. Our first result provides a tight geometric characterization of the optimal error in terms of the Chebyshev radius, a classical concept from geometry. This characterization applies to all compact metric spaces (in fact, even to all totally bounded spaces) and yields explicit formulas for natural metric spaces. Our second result addresses the asymptotic behavior of reconstruction, distinguishing between pseudo-finite spaces -- where the optimal error is attained after finitely many queries -- and spaces where the approximation curve exhibits nontrivial decay. We characterize pseudo-finiteness for convex Euclidean spaces.
title Reconstruction and Secrecy under Approximate Distance Queries
topic Machine Learning
Information Theory
Metric Geometry
I.2.6; H.2.7; K.4.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06461