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arXiv · 2601.16825

Privacy-Resolution Tradeoff for Adaptive Noisy Twenty Questions Estimation

Chunsong Sun·Lin Zhou
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Abstract

We revisit noisy twenty questions estimation and study the privacy-resolution tradeoff for adaptive query procedures. Specifically, in twenty questions estimation, there are two players: an oracle and a questioner. The questioner aims to estimate target variables by posing queries to the oracle that knows the variables and using noisy responses to form reliable estimates. Typically, there are adaptive and non-adaptive query procedures. In adaptive querying, one designs the current query using previous queries and their noisy responses while in non-adaptive querying, all queries are posed simultaneously. Generally speaking, adaptive query procedures yield better performance. However, adaptive querying leads to privacy concerns, which were first studied by Tsitsiklis, Xu and Xu (COLT 2018) and by Xu, Xu and Yang (AISTATS 2021) for the noiseless case, where the oracle always provides correct answers to queries. In this paper, we generalize the above results to the more practical noisy case, by proposing a two-stage private query procedure, analyzing its non-asymptotic and second-order asymptotic achievable performance and discussing the impact of privacy concerns. Furthermore, when specialized to the noiseless case, our private query procedure achieves better performance than above-mentioned query procedures (COLT 2018, AISTATS 2021).

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Chunsong Sun, Lin Zhou. 2026-01-23. Privacy-Resolution Tradeoff for Adaptive Noisy Twenty Questions Estimation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16825

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