arXiv subjects

Phanu Vajanopath

Publications and source records attributed to Phanu Vajanopath.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Decisive Margins in Differentially Private Voting

Differential privacy protects individual voting records by injecting randomness into the published outcome, but this noise can lead to erroneous results when an election is close. We study how precise central differential privacy and local differential privacy can be for common voting rules, including Plurality, Condorcet, Maximin, Plurality with Runoff, and Single Transferable Vote (STV). Our measure of precision is the margin of victory needed for a private mechanism to return the same winner as the non-private rule with high probability. We give private algorithms for publishing the winner and prove upper bounds on the required margin for these algorithms. We also prove lower bounds showing that nontrivial margins are necessary; many of these bounds match the corresponding upper bounds up to logarithmic factors. For STV, an information-theoretic upper bound matches the lower bound, but we prove that this guarantee cannot be achieved in polynomial time unless NP $\subseteq$ BPP. This gives a rare example of a computationally tractable task that becomes intractable when one simultaneously requires differential privacy and utility.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2026

Parsimonious Learning-Augmented Online Metric Matching

Learning-augmented algorithms have received significant attention in recent years, particularly in the context of online optimization. Motivated by the high computational cost of generating predictions, a growing line of work studies the tradeoff between performance guarantees and the number of predictions used in learning-augmented algorithms for problems such as caching and metrical task systems. In this paper, we extend this line of research to online metric matching by developing parsimonious learning-augmented algorithms and establishing lower bounds on their performance. Our approach extends the Follow-the-Prediction framework to the parsimonious setting by filling in a virtual prediction in the absence of an actual prediction, using an online metric matching algorithm that maintains good intermediate matchings throughout its execution. We complement our theoretical results with an empirical evaluation, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of our approach.

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arXiv2026

The Price of Privacy For Approximating Max-CSP

We study approximation algorithms for Maximum Constraint Satisfaction Problems (Max-CSPs) under differential privacy (DP) where the constraints are considered sensitive data. Information-theoretically, we aim to classify the best approximation ratios possible for a given privacy budget $\varepsilon$. In the high-privacy regime ($\varepsilon \ll 1$), we show that any $\varepsilon$-DP algorithm cannot beat a random assignment by more than $O(\varepsilon)$ in the approximation ratio. We devise a polynomial-time algorithm which matches this barrier under the assumptions that the instances are bounded-degree and triangle-free. Finally, we show that one or both of these assumptions can be removed for specific CSPs--such as Max-Cut or Max $k$-XOR--albeit at the cost of computational efficiency.

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arXiv2025

Improved Differentially Private Algorithms for Rank Aggregation

Rank aggregation is a task of combining the rankings of items from multiple users into a single ranking that best represents the users' rankings. Alabi et al. (AAAI'22) presents differentially-private (DP) polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTASes) and $5$-approximation algorithms with certain additive errors for the Kemeny rank aggregation problem in both central and local models. In this paper, we present improved DP PTASes with smaller additive error in the central model. Furthermore, we are first to study the footrule rank aggregation problem under DP. We give a near-optimal algorithm for this problem; as a corollary, this leads to 2-approximation algorithms with the same additive error as the $5$-approximation algorithms of Alabi et al. for the Kemeny rank aggregation problem in both central and local models.

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