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Alessandro Epasto

19 accepted papers

2026

Keeping a Secret Requires a Good Memory: Space Lower-Bounds for Private Algorithms

ICML 2026spotlight

We study the computational cost of differential privacy in terms of memory efficiency. While the trade-off between accuracy and differential privacy is well-understood, the inherent cost of privacy regarding memory use remains largely unexplored. This paper establishes for the first time an uncondit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Differentially Private Space-Efficient Algorithms for Counting Distinct Elements in the Turnstile Model

ICML 2025poster

The *turnstile* continual release model of differential privacy captures scenarios where a privacy-preserving real-time analysis is sought for a dataset evolving through additions and deletions. In typical applications of real-time data analysis, both the length of the stream $T$ and the size of t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Maximum Coverage in Turnstile Streams with Applications to Fingerprinting Measures

ICML 2025poster

In the maximum coverage problem we are given $d$ subsets from a universe $[n]$, and the goal is to output $k$ subsets such that their union covers the largest possible number of distinct items. We present the first algorithm for maximum coverage in the turnstile streaming model, where updates which…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Retraining with Predicted Hard Labels Provably Increases Model Accuracy

ICML 2025poster

The performance of a model trained with noisy labels is often improved by simply *retraining* the model with its *own predicted hard labels* (i.e., $1$/$0$ labels). Yet, a detailed theoretical characterization of this phenomenon is lacking. In this paper, we theoretically analyze retraining in a lin…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Scalable Private Partition Selection via Adaptive Weighting

ICML 2025poster

In the differentially private partition selection problem (a.k.a. set union, key discovery), users hold subsets of items from an unbounded universe. The goal is to output as many items as possible from the union of the users' sets while maintaining user-level differential privacy. Solutions to this…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Self-Boost via Optimal Retraining: An Analysis via Approximate Message Passing

NeurIPS 2025poster

Retraining a model using its own predictions together with the original, potentially noisy labels is a well-known strategy for improving the model’s performance. While prior works have demonstrated the benefits of specific heuristic retraining schemes, the question of how to optimally combine the mo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

A Scalable Algorithm for Individually Fair k-Means Clustering

AISTATS 2024poster

We present a scalable algorithm for the individually fair ($p$, $k$)-clustering problem introduced by Jung et al. and Mahabadi et al. Given $n$ points $P$ in a metric space, let $\delta(x)$ for $x\in P$ be the radius of the smallest ball around $x$ containing at least $n / k$ points. A clustering is…

2024

Perturb-and-Project: Differentially Private Similarities and Marginals

ICML 2024spotlight

We revisit the objective perturbations framework for differential privacy where noise is added to the input $A\in \mathcal{S}$ and the result is then projected back to the space of admissible datasets $\mathcal{S}$. Through this framework, we first design novel efficient algorithms to privately rele…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

$k$-Means Clustering with Distance-Based Privacy

NeurIPS 2023poster

In this paper, we initiate the study of Euclidean clustering with Distance-based privacy. Distance-based privacy is motivated by the fact that it is often only needed to protect the privacy of exact, rather than approximate, locations. We provide constant-approximate algorithms for $k$-means and $k$…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Differentially Private Hierarchical Clustering with Provable Approximation Guarantees

ICML 2023oral

Hierarchical Clustering is a popular unsupervised machine learning method with decades of history and numerous applications. We initiate the study of *differentially-private* approximation algorithms for hierarchical clustering under the rigorous framework introduced by Dasgupta (2016). We show stro…

2023

Private estimation algorithms for stochastic block models and mixture models

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

We introduce general tools for designing efficient private estimation algorithms, in the high-dimensional settings, whose statistical guarantees almost match those of the best known non-private algorithms. To illustrate our techniques, we consider two problems: recovery of stochastic block models an…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2022

Differentially Private Graph Learning via Sensitivity-Bounded Personalized PageRank

NeurIPS 2022accept

Personalized PageRank (PPR) is a fundamental tool in unsupervised learning of graph representations such as node ranking, labeling, and graph embedding. However, while data privacy is one of the most important recent concerns, existing PPR algorithms are not designed to protect user privacy. PPR is…

2022

Near-Optimal Private and Scalable $k$-Clustering

NeurIPS 2022accept

We study the differentially private (DP) $k$-means and $k$-median clustering problems of $n$ points in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space in the massively parallel computation (MPC) model. We provide two near-optimal algorithms where the near-optimality is in three aspects: they both achieve (1). $O(1)…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2020

Bisect and Conquer: Hierarchical Clustering via Max-Uncut Bisection

AISTATS 2020poster

Hierarchical Clustering is an unsupervised data analysis method which has been widely used for decades. Despite its popularity, it had an underdeveloped analytical foundation and to address this, Dasgupta recently introduced an optimization viewpoint of hierarchical clustering with…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2020

Sliding Window Algorithms for k-Clustering Problems

NeurIPS 2020poster

The sliding window model of computation captures scenarios in which data is arriving continuously, but only the latest $w$ elements should be used for analysis. The goal is to design algorithms that update the solution efficiently with each arrival rather than recomputing it from scratch. In this wo…

2020

Smoothly Bounding User Contributions in Differential Privacy

NeurIPS 2020poster

A differentially private algorithm guarantees that the input of a single user won’t significantly change the output distribution of the algorithm. When a user contributes more data points, more information can be collected to improve the algorithm’s performance. But at the same time, more noise migh…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar