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Sivakanth Gopi

Publications and source records attributed to Sivakanth Gopi.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Lower Bounds for Maximally Recoverable Tensor Code and Higher Order MDS Codes

An $(m,n,a,b)$-tensor code consists of $m\times n$ matrices whose columns satisfy `$a$' parity checks and rows satisfy `$b$' parity checks (i.e., a tensor code is the tensor product of a column code and row code). Tensor codes are useful in distributed storage because a single erasure can be corrected quickly either by reading its row or column. Maximally Recoverable (MR) Tensor Codes, introduced by Gopalan et al., are tensor codes which can correct every erasure pattern that is information theoretically possible to correct. The main questions about MR Tensor Codes are characterizing which erasure patterns are correctable and obtaining explicit constructions over small fields. In this paper, we study the important special case when $a=1$, i.e., the columns satisfy a single parity check equation. We introduce the notion of higher order MDS codes (MDS$(\ell)$ codes) which is an interesting generalization of the well-known MDS codes, where $\ell$ captures the order of genericity of points in a low-dimensional space. We then prove that a tensor code with $a=1$ is MR iff the row code is an MDS$(m)$ code. We then show that MDS$(m)$ codes satisfy some weak duality. Using this characterization and duality, we prove that $(m,n,a=1,b)$-MR tensor codes require fields of size $q=Ω_{m,b}(n^{\min\{b,m\}-1})$. Our lower bound also extends to the setting of $a>1$. We also give a deterministic polynomial time algorithm to check if a given erasure pattern is correctable by the MR tensor code (when $a=1$).

cs.IT↗

Private Convex Optimization in General Norms

We propose a new framework for differentially private optimization of convex functions which are Lipschitz in an arbitrary norm $\|\cdot\|$. Our algorithms are based on a regularized exponential mechanism which samples from the density $\propto \exp(-k(F+μr))$ where $F$ is the empirical loss and $r$ is a regularizer which is strongly convex with respect to $\|\cdot\|$, generalizing a recent work of [Gopi, Lee, Liu '22] to non-Euclidean settings. We show that this mechanism satisfies Gaussian differential privacy and solves both DP-ERM (empirical risk minimization) and DP-SCO (stochastic convex optimization) by using localization tools from convex geometry. Our framework is the first to apply to private convex optimization in general normed spaces and directly recovers non-private SCO rates achieved by mirror descent as the privacy parameter $ε\to \infty$. As applications, for Lipschitz optimization in $\ell_p$ norms for all $p \in (1, 2)$, we obtain the first optimal privacy-utility tradeoffs; for $p = 1$, we improve tradeoffs obtained by the recent works [Asi, Feldman, Koren, Talwar '21, Bassily, Guzman, Nandi '21] by at least a logarithmic factor. Our $\ell_p$ norm and Schatten-$p$ norm optimization frameworks are complemented with polynomial-time samplers whose query complexity we explicitly bound.

cs.LG↗

Private Convex Optimization via Exponential Mechanism

In this paper, we study private optimization problems for non-smooth convex functions $F(x)=\mathbb{E}_i f_i(x)$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that modifying the exponential mechanism by adding an $\ell_2^2$ regularizer to $F(x)$ and sampling from $π(x)\propto \exp(-k(F(x)+μ\|x\|_2^2/2))$ recovers both the known optimal empirical risk and population loss under $(ε,δ)$-DP. Furthermore, we show how to implement this mechanism using $\widetilde{O}(n \min(d, n))$ queries to $f_i(x)$ for the DP-SCO where $n$ is the number of samples/users and $d$ is the ambient dimension. We also give a (nearly) matching lower bound $\widetildeΩ(n \min(d, n))$ on the number of evaluation queries. Our results utilize the following tools that are of independent interest: (1) We prove Gaussian Differential Privacy (GDP) of the exponential mechanism if the loss function is strongly convex and the perturbation is Lipschitz. Our privacy bound is \emph{optimal} as it includes the privacy of Gaussian mechanism as a special case and is proved using the isoperimetric inequality for strongly log-concave measures. (2) We show how to sample from $\exp(-F(x)-μ\|x\|^2_2/2)$ for $G$-Lipschitz $F$ with $η$ error in total variation (TV) distance using $\widetilde{O}((G^2/μ) \log^2(d/η))$ unbiased queries to $F(x)$. This is the first sampler whose query complexity has \emph{polylogarithmic dependence} on both dimension $d$ and accuracy $η$.

cs.DS↗

Differentially Private Fine-tuning of Language Models

We give simpler, sparser, and faster algorithms for differentially private fine-tuning of large-scale pre-trained language models, which achieve the state-of-the-art privacy versus utility tradeoffs on many standard NLP tasks. We propose a meta-framework for this problem, inspired by the recent success of highly parameter-efficient methods for fine-tuning. Our experiments show that differentially private adaptations of these approaches outperform previous private algorithms in three important dimensions: utility, privacy, and the computational and memory cost of private training. On many commonly studied datasets, the utility of private models approaches that of non-private models. For example, on the MNLI dataset we achieve an accuracy of $87.8\%$ using RoBERTa-Large and $83.5\%$ using RoBERTa-Base with a privacy budget of $ε= 6.7$. In comparison, absent privacy constraints, RoBERTa-Large achieves an accuracy of $90.2\%$. Our findings are similar for natural language generation tasks. Privately fine-tuning with DART, GPT-2-Small, GPT-2-Medium, GPT-2-Large, and GPT-2-XL achieve BLEU scores of 38.5, 42.0, 43.1, and 43.8 respectively (privacy budget of $ε= 6.8,δ=$ 1e-5) whereas the non-private baseline is $48.1$. All our experiments suggest that larger models are better suited for private fine-tuning: while they are well known to achieve superior accuracy non-privately, we find that they also better maintain their accuracy when privacy is introduced.

cs.LG↗

Improved Maximally Recoverable LRCs using Skew Polynomials

An $(n,r,h,a,q)$-Local Reconstruction Code (LRC) is a linear code over $\mathbb{F}_q$ of length $n$, whose codeword symbols are partitioned into $n/r$ local groups each of size $r$. Each local group satisfies `$a$' local parity checks to recover from `$a$' erasures in that local group and there are further $h$ global parity checks to provide fault tolerance from more global erasure patterns. Such an LRC is Maximally Recoverable (MR), if it offers the best blend of locality and global erasure resilience -- namely it can correct all erasure patterns whose recovery is information-theoretically feasible given the locality structure (these are precisely patterns with up to `$a$' erasures in each local group and an additional $h$ erasures anywhere in the codeword). Random constructions can easily show the existence of MR LRCs over very large fields, but a major algebraic challenge is to construct MR LRCs, or even show their existence, over smaller fields, as well as understand inherent lower bounds on their field size. We give an explicit construction of $(n,r,h,a,q)$-MR LRCs with field size $q$ bounded by $\left(O\left(\max\{r,n/r\}\right)\right)^{\min\{h,r-a\}}$. This improves upon known constructions in many relevant parameter ranges. Moreover, it matches the lower bound from Gopi et al. (2020) in an interesting range of parameters where $r=Θ(\sqrt{n})$, $r-a=Θ(\sqrt{n})$ and $h$ is a fixed constant with $h\le a+2$, achieving the optimal field size of $Θ_{h}(n^{h/2}).$ Our construction is based on the theory of skew polynomials. We believe skew polynomials should have further applications in coding and complexity theory; as a small illustration we show how to capture algebraic results underlying list decoding folded Reed-Solomon and multiplicity codes in a unified way within this theory.

cs.IT↗

Differentially Private Set Union

We study the basic operation of set union in the global model of differential privacy. In this problem, we are given a universe $U$ of items, possibly of infinite size, and a database $D$ of users. Each user $i$ contributes a subset $W_i \subseteq U$ of items. We want an ($ε$,$δ$)-differentially private algorithm which outputs a subset $S \subset \cup_i W_i$ such that the size of $S$ is as large as possible. The problem arises in countless real world applications; it is particularly ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) applications as vocabulary extraction. For example, discovering words, sentences, $n$-grams etc., from private text data belonging to users is an instance of the set union problem. Known algorithms for this problem proceed by collecting a subset of items from each user, taking the union of such subsets, and disclosing the items whose noisy counts fall above a certain threshold. Crucially, in the above process, the contribution of each individual user is always independent of the items held by other users, resulting in a wasteful aggregation process, where some item counts happen to be way above the threshold. We deviate from the above paradigm by allowing users to contribute their items in a $\textit{dependent fashion}$, guided by a $\textit{policy}$. In this new setting ensuring privacy is significantly delicate. We prove that any policy which has certain $\textit{contractive}$ properties would result in a differentially private algorithm. We design two new algorithms, one using Laplace noise and other Gaussian noise, as specific instances of policies satisfying the contractive properties. Our experiments show that the new algorithms significantly outperform previously known mechanisms for the problem.

cs.CR↗

Numerical Composition of Differential Privacy

We give a fast algorithm to optimally compose privacy guarantees of differentially private (DP) algorithms to arbitrary accuracy. Our method is based on the notion of privacy loss random variables to quantify the privacy loss of DP algorithms. The running time and memory needed for our algorithm to approximate the privacy curve of a DP algorithm composed with itself $k$ times is $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{k})$. This improves over the best prior method by Koskela et al. (2020) which requires $\tildeΩ(k^{1.5})$ running time. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithm by accurately computing the privacy loss of DP-SGD algorithm of Abadi et al. (2016) and showing that our algorithm speeds up the privacy computations by a few orders of magnitude compared to prior work, while maintaining similar accuracy.

cs.DS↗

Differentially Private n-gram Extraction

We revisit the problem of $n$-gram extraction in the differential privacy setting. In this problem, given a corpus of private text data, the goal is to release as many $n$-grams as possible while preserving user level privacy. Extracting $n$-grams is a fundamental subroutine in many NLP applications such as sentence completion, response generation for emails etc. The problem also arises in other applications such as sequence mining, and is a generalization of recently studied differentially private set union (DPSU). In this paper, we develop a new differentially private algorithm for this problem which, in our experiments, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. Our improvements stem from combining recent advances in DPSU, privacy accounting, and new heuristics for pruning in the tree-based approach initiated by Chen et al. (2012).

cs.LG↗

Fast and Memory Efficient Differentially Private-SGD via JL Projections

Differentially Private-SGD (DP-SGD) of Abadi et al. (2016) and its variations are the only known algorithms for private training of large scale neural networks. This algorithm requires computation of per-sample gradients norms which is extremely slow and memory intensive in practice. In this paper, we present a new framework to design differentially private optimizers called DP-SGD-JL and DP-Adam-JL. Our approach uses Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) projections to quickly approximate the per-sample gradient norms without exactly computing them, thus making the training time and memory requirements of our optimizers closer to that of their non-DP versions. Unlike previous attempts to make DP-SGD faster which work only on a subset of network architectures or use compiler techniques, we propose an algorithmic solution which works for any network in a black-box manner which is the main contribution of this paper. To illustrate this, on IMDb dataset, we train a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to achieve good privacy-vs-accuracy tradeoff, while being significantly faster than DP-SGD and with a similar memory footprint as non-private SGD. The privacy analysis of our algorithms is more involved than DP-SGD, we use the recently proposed f-DP framework of Dong et al. (2019) to prove privacy.

cs.LG↗

Locally Private Hypothesis Selection

We initiate the study of hypothesis selection under local differential privacy. Given samples from an unknown probability distribution $p$ and a set of $k$ probability distributions $\mathcal{Q}$, we aim to output, under the constraints of $\varepsilon$-local differential privacy, a distribution from $\mathcal{Q}$ whose total variation distance to $p$ is comparable to the best such distribution. This is a generalization of the classic problem of $k$-wise simple hypothesis testing, which corresponds to when $p \in \mathcal{Q}$, and we wish to identify $p$. Absent privacy constraints, this problem requires $O(\log k)$ samples from $p$, and it was recently shown that the same complexity is achievable under (central) differential privacy. However, the naive approach to this problem under local differential privacy would require $\tilde O(k^2)$ samples. We first show that the constraint of local differential privacy incurs an exponential increase in cost: any algorithm for this problem requires at least $Ω(k)$ samples. Second, for the special case of $k$-wise simple hypothesis testing, we provide a non-interactive algorithm which nearly matches this bound, requiring $\tilde O(k)$ samples. Finally, we provide sequentially interactive algorithms for the general case, requiring $\tilde O(k)$ samples and only $O(\log \log k)$ rounds of interactivity. Our algorithms are achieved through a reduction to maximum selection with adversarial comparators, a problem of independent interest for which we initiate study in the parallel setting. For this problem, we provide a family of algorithms for each number of allowed rounds of interaction $t$, as well as lower bounds showing that they are near-optimal for every $t$. Notably, our algorithms result in exponential improvements on the round complexity of previous methods.

cs.DS↗

CSPs with Global Modular Constraints: Algorithms and Hardness via Polynomial Representations

We study the complexity of Boolean constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) when the assignment must have Hamming weight in some congruence class modulo M, for various choices of the modulus M. Due to the known classification of tractable Boolean CSPs, this mainly reduces to the study of three cases: 2-SAT, HORN-SAT, and LIN-2 (linear equations mod 2). We classify the moduli M for which these respective problems are polynomial time solvable, and when they are not (assuming the ETH). Our study reveals that this modular constraint lends a surprising richness to these classic, well-studied problems, with interesting broader connections to complexity theory and coding theory. The HORN-SAT case is connected to the covering complexity of polynomials representing the NAND function mod M. The LIN-2 case is tied to the sparsity of polynomials representing the OR function mod M, which in turn has connections to modular weight distribution properties of linear codes and locally decodable codes. In both cases, the analysis of our algorithm as well as the hardness reduction rely on these polynomial representations, highlighting an interesting algebraic common ground between hard cases for our algorithms and the gadgets which show hardness. These new complexity measures of polynomial representations merit further study. The inspiration for our study comes from a recent work by Nägele, Sudakov, and Zenklusen on submodular minimization with a global congruence constraint. Our algorithm for HORN-SAT has strong similarities to their algorithm, and in particular identical kind of set systems arise in both cases. Our connection to polynomial representations leads to a simpler analysis of such set systems, and also sheds light on (but does not resolve) the complexity of submodular minimization with a congruency requirement modulo a composite M.

cs.CC↗

Spanoids - an abstraction of spanning structures, and a barrier for LCCs

We introduce a simple logical inference structure we call a $\textsf{spanoid}$ (generalizing the notion of a matroid), which captures well-studied problems in several areas. These include combinatorial geometry, algebra (arrangements of hypersurfaces and ideals), statistical physics (bootstrap percolation) and coding theory. We initiate a thorough investigation of spanoids, from computational and structural viewpoints, focusing on parameters relevant to the applications areas above and, in particular, to questions regarding Locally Correctable Codes (LCCs). One central parameter we study is the $\textsf{rank}$ of a spanoid, extending the rank of a matroid and related to the dimension of codes. This leads to one main application of our work, establishing the first known barrier to improving the nearly 20-year old bound of Katz-Trevisan (KT) on the dimension of LCCs. On the one hand, we prove that the KT bound (and its more recent refinements) holds for the much more general setting of spanoid rank. On the other hand we show that there exist (random) spanoids whose rank matches these bounds. Thus, to significantly improve the known bounds one must step out of the spanoid framework. Another parameter we explore is the $\textsf{functional rank}$ of a spanoid, which captures the possibility of turning a given spanoid into an actual code. The question of the relationship between rank and functional rank is one of the main questions we raise as it may reveal new avenues for constructing new LCCs (perhaps even matching the KT bound). As a first step, we develop an entropy relaxation of functional rank to create a small constant gap and amplify it by tensoring to construct a spanoid whose functional rank is smaller than rank by a polynomial factor. This is evidence that the entropy method we develop can prove polynomially better bounds than KT-type methods on the dimension of LCCs.

cs.CC↗

Maximally Recoverable LRCs: A field size lower bound and constructions for few heavy parities

The explosion in the volumes of data being stored online has resulted in distributed storage systems transitioning to erasure coding based schemes. Local Reconstruction Codes (LRCs) have emerged as the codes of choice for these applications. These codes can correct a small number of erasures by accessing only a small number of remaining coordinates. An $(n,r,h,a,q)$-LRC is a linear code over $\mathbb{F}_q$ of length $n$, whose codeword symbols are partitioned into $g=n/r$ local groups each of size $r$. It has $h$ global parity checks and each local group has $a$ local parity checks. Such an LRC is Maximally Recoverable (MR), if it corrects all erasure patterns which are information-theoretically correctable under the stipulated structure of local and global parity checks. We show the first non-trivial lower bounds on the field size required for MR LRCs. When $a,h$ are constant and the number of local groups $g \ge h$, while $r$ may grow with $n$, our lower bound simplifies to $q\ge Ω_{a,h}\left(n\cdot r^{\min\{a,h-2\}}\right).$ No superlinear (in $n$) lower bounds were known prior to this work for any setting of parameters. MR LRCs deployed in practice have a small number of global parities, typically $h=2,3$. We complement our lower bounds by giving constructions with small field size for $h\le 3$. For $h=2$, we give a linear field size construction. We also show a surprising application of elliptic curves and arithmetic progression free sets in the construction of MR LRCs.

cs.IT↗

Gaussian width bounds with applications to arithmetic progressions in random settings

Motivated by problems on random differences in Szemerédi's theorem and on large deviations for arithmetic progressions in random sets, we prove upper bounds on the Gaussian width of point sets that are formed by the image of the $n$-dimensional Boolean hypercube under a mapping $ψ:\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}^k$, where each coordinate is a constant-degree multilinear polynomial with 0-1 coefficients. We show the following applications of our bounds. Let $[\mathbb{Z}/N\mathbb{Z}]_p$ be the random subset of $\mathbb{Z}/N\mathbb{Z}$ containing each element independently with probability $p$. $\bullet$ A set $D\subseteq \mathbb{Z}/N\mathbb{Z}$ is $\ell$-intersective if any dense subset of $\mathbb{Z}/N\mathbb{Z}$ contains a proper $(\ell+1)$-term arithmetic progression with common difference in $D$. Our main result implies that $[\mathbb{Z}/N\mathbb{Z}]_p$ is $\ell$-intersective with probability $1 - o(1)$ provided $p \geq ω(N^{-β_\ell}\log N)$ for $β_\ell = (\lceil(\ell+1)/2\rceil)^{-1}$. This gives a polynomial improvement for all $\ell \ge 3$ of a previous bound due to Frantzikinakis, Lesigne and Wierdl, and reproves more directly the same improvement shown recently by the authors and Dvir. $\bullet$ Let $X_k$ be the number of $k$-term arithmetic progressions in $[\mathbb{Z}/N\mathbb{Z}]_p$ and consider the large deviation rate $ρ_k(δ) = \log\Pr[X_k \geq (1+δ)\mathbb{E}X_k]$. We give quadratic improvements of the best-known range of $p$ for which a highly precise estimate of $ρ_k(δ)$ due to Bhattacharya, Ganguly, Shao and Zhao is valid for all odd $k \geq 5$. We also discuss connections with error correcting codes (locally decodable codes) and the Banach-space notion of type for injective tensor products of $\ell_p$-spaces.

math.CO↗

Outlaw distributions and locally decodable codes

Locally decodable codes (LDCs) are error correcting codes that allow for decoding of a single message bit using a small number of queries to a corrupted encoding. Despite decades of study, the optimal trade-off between query complexity and codeword length is far from understood. In this work, we give a new characterization of LDCs using distributions over Boolean functions whose expectation is hard to approximate (in~$L_\infty$~norm) with a small number of samples. We coin the term `outlaw distributions' for such distributions since they `defy' the Law of Large Numbers. We show that the existence of outlaw distributions over sufficiently `smooth' functions implies the existence of constant query LDCs and vice versa. We give several candidates for outlaw distributions over smooth functions coming from finite field incidence geometry, additive combinatorics and from hypergraph (non)expanders. We also prove a useful lemma showing that (smooth) LDCs which are only required to work on average over a random message and a random message index can be turned into true LDCs at the cost of only constant factors in the parameters.

cs.CC↗

Lower bounds for 2-query LCCs over large alphabet

A locally correctable code (LCC) is an error correcting code that allows correction of any arbitrary coordinate of a corrupted codeword by querying only a few coordinates. We show that any {\em zero-error} $2$-query locally correctable code $\mathcal{C}: \{0,1\}^k \to Σ^n$ that can correct a constant fraction of corrupted symbols must have $n \geq \exp(k/\log|Σ|)$. We say that an LCC is zero-error if there exists a non-adaptive corrector algorithm that succeeds with probability $1$ when the input is an uncorrupted codeword. All known constructions of LCCs are zero-error. Our result is tight upto constant factors in the exponent. The only previous lower bound on the length of 2-query LCCs over large alphabet was $Ω\left((k/\log|Σ|)^2\right)$ due to Katz and Trevisan (STOC 2000). Our bound implies that zero-error LCCs cannot yield $2$-server private information retrieval (PIR) schemes with sub-polynomial communication. Since there exists a $2$-server PIR scheme with sub-polynomial communication (STOC 2015) based on a zero-error $2$-query locally decodable code (LDC), we also obtain a separation between LDCs and LCCs over large alphabet. For our proof of the result, we need a new decomposition lemma for directed graphs that may be of independent interest. Given a dense directed graph $G$, our decomposition uses the directed version of Szemerédi regularity lemma due to Alon and Shapira (STOC 2003) to partition almost all of $G$ into a constant number of subgraphs which are either edge-expanding or empty.

cs.CC↗

Competitive analysis of the top-K ranking problem

Motivated by applications in recommender systems, web search, social choice and crowdsourcing, we consider the problem of identifying the set of top $K$ items from noisy pairwise comparisons. In our setting, we are non-actively given $r$ pairwise comparisons between each pair of $n$ items, where each comparison has noise constrained by a very general noise model called the strong stochastic transitivity (SST) model. We analyze the competitive ratio of algorithms for the top-$K$ problem. In particular, we present a linear time algorithm for the top-$K$ problem which has a competitive ratio of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$; i.e. to solve any instance of top-$K$, our algorithm needs at most $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$ times as many samples needed as the best possible algorithm for that instance (in contrast, all previous known algorithms for the top-$K$ problem have competitive ratios of $\tildeΩ(n)$ or worse). We further show that this is tight: any algorithm for the top-$K$ problem has competitive ratio at least $\tildeΩ(\sqrt{n})$.

cs.DS↗

Lower bounds for constant query affine-invariant LCCs and LTCs

Affine-invariant codes are codes whose coordinates form a vector space over a finite field and which are invariant under affine transformations of the coordinate space. They form a natural, well-studied class of codes; they include popular codes such as Reed-Muller and Reed-Solomon. A particularly appealing feature of affine-invariant codes is that they seem well-suited to admit local correctors and testers. In this work, we give lower bounds on the length of locally correctable and locally testable affine-invariant codes with constant query complexity. We show that if a code $\mathcal{C} \subset Σ^{\mathbb{K}^n}$ is an $r$-query locally correctable code (LCC), where $\mathbb{K}$ is a finite field and $Σ$ is a finite alphabet, then the number of codewords in $\mathcal{C}$ is at most $\exp(O_{\mathbb{K}, r, |Σ|}(n^{r-1}))$. Also, we show that if $\mathcal{C} \subset Σ^{\mathbb{K}^n}$ is an $r$-query locally testable code (LTC), then the number of codewords in $\mathcal{C}$ is at most $\exp(O_{\mathbb{K}, r, |Σ|}(n^{r-2}))$. The dependence on $n$ in these bounds is tight for constant-query LCCs/LTCs, since Guo, Kopparty and Sudan (ITCS `13) construct affine-invariant codes via lifting that have the same asymptotic tradeoffs. Note that our result holds for non-linear codes, whereas previously, Ben-Sasson and Sudan (RANDOM `11) assumed linearity to derive similar results. Our analysis uses higher-order Fourier analysis. In particular, we show that the codewords corresponding to an affine-invariant LCC/LTC must be far from each other with respect to Gowers norm of an appropriate order. This then allows us to bound the number of codewords, using known decomposition theorems which approximate any bounded function in terms of a finite number of low-degree non-classical polynomials, upto a small error in the Gowers norm.

cs.CC↗