We are organizing a two days virtual conference on “robustness and privacy” on March 22 and March 23, 2021.

The registration is free but mandatory; a Zoom link will be sent to all participants a day before the conference

register here

Each talk will be 25 minutes long followed by a 5 minutes dicussion for questions. The conference should start on Monday 22th of March and Tuesday 23rd of March at 16:30 up to 19h40 (Paris local time).

Confirmed speakers:

Marco Avella Medina
Title: Differentially private inference via noisy optimization

Abstract: We propose a general optimization-based framework for computing differentially private M-estimators and a new method for the construction of differentially private confidence regions. Firstly, we show that robust statistics can be used in conjunction with noisy gradient descent and noisy Newton methods in order to obtain optimal private estimators with global linear or quadratic convergence, respectively. We establish global convergence guarantees, under both local strong convexity and self-concordance, showing that our private estimators converge with high probability to a neighborhood of the non-private M-estimators. The radius of this neighborhood is nearly optimal in the sense it corresponds to the statistical minimax cost of differential privacy up to a logarithmic term. Secondly, we tackle the problem of parametric inference by constructing differentially private estimators of the asymptotic variance of our private M-estimators. This naturally leads to the use of approximate pivotal statistics for the construction of confidence regions and hypothesis testing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a bias correction that leads to enhanced small-sample empirical performance in simulations. We illustrate the benefits of our methods with synthetic numerical examples and real data.

This is joint work with Casey Bradshaw and Po-Ling Loh.

Tom Berrett

Title: Locally private non-asymptotic testing of discrete distributions is faster using interactive mechanisms

abstract: In this talk I will present recent work on goodness-of-fit testing under local differential privacy constraints. There are two broad classes of locally private procedures: simple non-interactive procedures and interactive procedures where communication is allowed between individual data holders. One of the main conclusions of our work is that the minimax separation rates are significantly faster using interactive mechanisms.

We find the minimax separation rates for testing multinomial or more general discrete distributions. Our upper bounds are found by constructing efficient randomized algorithms and test procedures, in both the case where only non-interactive privacy mechanisms are allowed and also in the case where all sequentially interactive privacy mechanisms are allowed, and establish a gap between the rates. We prove general information theoretical bounds that allow us to establish the optimality of our algorithms among all pairs of privacy mechanisms and test procedures, in most usual cases. Considered examples include testing uniform, polynomially and exponentially decreasing distributions.

Clément Canonne
Title: Lower bounds for high-dimensional estimation under “local” information constraints

abstract: The focus of this talk is distributed parameter estimation using interactive protocols subject to “local information constraints.” Those constraints include, among others local differential privacy (LDP), communication constraints, and restricted measurements.

I’ll cover recent work which provides a general framework which lets us obtain tight lower bounds for both estimation and testing of discrete distributions. I’ll then discuss how to extend this framework to other parametric families, including mean estimation for product distributions over the hypercube and high-dimensional Gaussians.

Based on joint works with Jayadev Acharya, Yuhan Liu, Ziteng Sun and Himanshu Tyagi.

Links to paper 1 and paper 2

Olivier Catoni
Means and $k$-means: dimension free PAC-Bayesian bounds for some robust estimators

abstract: We will show, through results obtained in collaboratiton with Ilaria Giulini and Gautier Appert, how PAC-Bayesian bounds can be used as an alternative to other methods to prove concentration inequalities and complexity bounds. We will take the example of the robust estimation of the mean of a random vector. We will then discuss the problem of vector quantization according to a robust modification of the $k$-means loss function.

Links to paper 1, paper 2, paper 3 and paper 4.

Yeshwanth Cherapanamjeri
Title: Optimal Mean Estimation without a Variance

Abstract: Estimating the mean of a distribution from i.i.d samples is a fundamental statistical task. In this talk, we will focus on the high dimensional setting where we will design estimators achieving optimal recovery guarantees in terms of all relevant parameters. While optimal one dimensional estimators have been known since the 80s (Nemirovskii and Yudin ‘83), optimal estimators in high dimensions have only been discovered recently beginning with the seminal work of Lugosi and Mendelson in 2017 and subsequent work has led to computationally efficient variants of these estimators (Hopkins 2018). We will discuss statistical and computational extensions of these results by developing optimal estimators for settings where the data distribution only obeys a finite fractional moment condition as opposed to the existence of a second moment as assumed previously.

Joint work with Peter Bartlett, Nicolas Flammarion, Michael I. Jordan and Nilesh Tripuraneni.

The talk will be based on the following papers: paper 1 and paper 2.

Jules Depersin
Title: Using VC-dimension in robust estimation

abstract: Median-of-means (MOM) based procedures provide non-asymptotic and strong deviation bounds even when data are heavy-tailed and/or corrupted. We will try to explain how those procedures can easily be adapted to a number of different statistical problems, and we will give the general ways to bound the excess risk for MOM estimators, with an emphasis on the different notions of statistical complexity (VC dimension, Rademacher complexity) that can be used to do so. We will see that each classical notion of complexity is suboptimal in its own way, leaving open the question of the optimal way to measure the statistical complexity of robust estimation problems.

John Duchi
Title: Near Instance-Optimality in Differential Privacy

Abstract: We develop two notions of instance optimality in differential privacy, inspired by classical statistical theory: one by defining a local minimax risk and the other by considering unbiased mechanisms and analogizing the Cramer-Rao bound, and we show that the local modulus of continuity of the estimand of interest completely determines these quantities. We also develop a complementary collection mechanisms, which we term the inverse sensitivity mechanisms, which are instance optimal (or nearly instance optimal) for a large class of estimands. Moreover, these mechanisms uniformly outperform the smooth sensitivity framework on each instance for several function classes of interest, including real-valued continuous functions. We carefully present two instantiations of the mechanisms for median and robust regression estimation with corresponding experiments.

Based on joint work with Hilal Asi

Linto paper

Chao Gao
Title: Robust Regression with Contamination

abstract: We study regression with contaminated observations. We will discuss different results depending on whether both the responses and the covariates are contaminated or only the responses are contaminated. General minimax rates are derived based on regression depth functions when both the responses and the covariates are contaminated. The result implies consistency is possible only if the contamination proportion is vanishing. In comparison, we show that when the covariates are clean, consistent robust regression is actually possible even when the contamination proportion approaches one. A near-optimal procedure in this case is the simple median regression. Applications of the second setting in model repair problems will also be discussed.

Sam Hopkins
Title: Robustly Learning any Clusterable Mixture of Gaussians

Abstract: We study the efficient learnability of high-dimensional Gaussian mixtures in the outlier-robust setting, where a small constant fraction of the data is adversarially corrupted. We resolve the polynomial learnability of this problem when the components are pairwise separated in total variation distance. Specifically, we provide an algorithm that, for any constant number of components $$k$$, runs in polynomial time and learns the components of an $$\epsilon$$-corrupted $$k$$-mixture within information theoretically near-optimal error of $$O(\epsilon)$$, under the assumption that the overlap between any pair of components $$Pi,Pj$$ (i.e., the quantity $$1−TV(Pi,Pj)$$) is bounded by poly($$\epsilon$$)).

Our separation condition is the qualitatively weakest assumption under which accurate clustering of the samples is possible. In particular, it allows for components with arbitrary covariances and for components with identical means, as long as their covariances differ sufficiently. Ours is the first polynomial time algorithm for this problem, even for $$k=2$$.

Our algorithm follows the Sum-of-Squares based proofs to algorithms approach. Our main technical contribution is a new robust identifiability proof of clusters from a Gaussian mixture, which can be captured by the constant-degree Sum of Squares proof system. The key ingredients of this proof are a novel use of SoS-certifiable anti-concentration and a new characterization of pairs of Gaussians with small (dimension-independent) overlap in terms of their parameter distance.

Gautam Kamath
Title: Differentially Private Mean and Covariance Estimation

Abstract: We cover recent progress in minimax rates for differentially private parameter estimation. As a canonical example, how much data do we need to estimate the parameters of a multivariate Gaussian distribution? A particular focus will be placed on qualitative differences with the non-private setting.

Links to paper 1 and paper 2

Pavlo Mozharovskyi
Title: Approximate computation of projection depths

Abstract: Data depth is a concept in multivariate statistics that measures the centrality of a point in a given data cloud in the Euclidean space. If the depth of a point can be represented as the minimum of the depths with respect to all one-dimensional projections of the data, then the depth satisfies the so-called projection property. Such depths form an important class that includes many of the depths that have been proposed in literature. For depths that satisfy the projection property an approximate algorithm can easily be constructed since taking the minimum of the depths with respect to only a finite number of one-dimensional projections yields an upper bound for the depth with respect to the multivariate data. Such an algorithm is particularly useful if no exact algorithm exists or if the exact algorithm has a high computational complexity, as is the case with the halfspace depth or the projection depth. To compute these depths in high dimensions, the use of an approximate algorithm with better complexity is surely preferable. Instead of focusing on a single method we provide a comprehensive and fair comparison of several methods, both already described in the literature and original.

Weijie Su
Title: A Central Limit Theorem for Differentially Private Query Answering

Abstract: Perhaps the single most important use case for differential privacy is to privately answer numerical queries, which is usually achieved by adding noise to the answer vector. The central question is, therefore, to understand which noise distribution optimizes the privacy-accuracy trade-off, especially when the dimension of the answer vector is high. Accordingly, extensive literature has been dedicated to the question and the upper and lower bounds have been matched up to constant factors. In this talk, we take a novel approach to address this important optimality question. We first demonstrate an intriguing central limit theorem phenomenon in the high-dimensional regime. More precisely, we prove that a mechanism is approximately Gaussian differentially private if the added noise satisfies certain conditions. In particular, densities proportional to $$\exp(-|x|_p^\alpha)$$, where $$|x|_p$$ is the standard $$\ell_p$$-norm, satisfies the conditions. Taking this perspective, we make use of the Cramer–Rao inequality and show an uncertainty principle style result: the product of privacy parameter and the $$\ell_2$$-loss of the mechanism is lower bounded by the dimension. Furthermore, the Gaussian mechanism achieves the constant-sharp optimal privacy-accuracy trade-off among all such noises. Our findings are corroborated by numerical experiments. This is joint work with Jinshuo Dong and Linjun Zhang.

Schedule (Paris local time)

Monday 22 March Tuesday 23 March
16:30 -- 17:00 Olivier Catoni Weijie Su
17:00 -- 17:30 Samuel Hopkins Gautam Kamath
17:30 -- 18:00 Pavlo Mozharovskyi Clément Canonne
18:00 -- 18:10 BREAK BREAK
18:10 -- 18:40 Tom Berrett Yeshwanth Cherapanamjeri
18:40 -- 19:10 Marco Avella Medina Jules Depersin
19:10 -- 19:40 John Duchi Chao Gao

Support The conference is suported by the mathematical institute of CNRS and the Médiamétrie Chair.