Achieving the Exactly Optimal Privacy-Utility Trade-Off with Low Communication Cost via Shared Randomness

TL;DR

This paper introduces new shared randomness-based local differential privacy schemes that achieve the exact optimal privacy-utility trade-off with minimal communication cost, improving efficiency in distribution estimation tasks.

Contribution

It proposes novel resolutions of block design schemes that attain the optimal privacy-utility trade-off with low communication costs, including explicit and recursive algorithms.

Findings

Baranyai's resolution achieves minimum communication cost among PUT-optimal resolutions.

Cyclic shift resolution has an explicit structure but slightly higher communication cost.

Resolutions for other block design schemes optimize PUT for specific privacy budgets.

Abstract

We consider a discrete distribution estimation problem under a local differential privacy (LDP) constraint in the presence of shared randomness. By exploiting the shared randomness, we suggest a new method for constructing LDP schemes which achieve the exactly optimal privacy-utility trade-off (PUT) with the communication cost of less than or equal to the input data size for any privacy regime. The main idea is to decompose a block design scheme by Park et al. (2023), based on the combinatorial concept called resolution. The LDP scheme decomposed from a block design scheme is called a resolution of the block design scheme, and it achieves the same PUT as the original block design scheme while requiring a less communication cost. We provide two resolutions of an exactly PUT-optimal block design scheme, called the Baranyai's resolution and the cyclic shift resolution, both requiring the communication cost of less than or equal to the input data size. In particular, we show that the Baranyai's resolution achieves the minimum communication cost among all the PUT-optimal resolutions of block design schemes. One drawback of the Baranyai's resolution is that it can be obtained through a recursive algorithm in general. In contrast, the cyclic shift resolution has an explicit structure, but its communication cost can be larger than that of Baranyai's resolution. To complement this, we also suggest resolutions of other block design schemes achieving the optimal PUT for some privacy budgets, which require the minimum communication cost as the Baranyai's resolution and have explicit structures as the cyclic shift resolution.