← Search

Jelani Nelson

12 accepted papers

2026

Hot PATE: Private Aggregation of Distributions for Diverse Tasks

ICLR 2026poster

The Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE) framework enables privacy-preserving machine learning by aggregating responses from disjoint subsets of sensitive data. Adaptations of PATE to tasks with inherent output diversity such as text generation, where the desired output is a sample from a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Private Vector Mean Estimation in the Shuffle Model: Optimal Rates Require Many Messages

ICML 2024poster

We study the problem of private vector mean estimation in the shuffle model of privacy where $n$ users each have a unit vector $v^{(i)} \in \mathbb{R}^d$. We propose a new multi-message protocol that achieves the optimal error using $O(\min(n\varepsilon^2,d))$ messages per user. Moreover, we show th…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Sparse Dimensionality Reduction Revisited

ICML 2024poster

The sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform is one of the central techniques in dimensionality reduction. It supports embedding a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ into $m=O(\varepsilon^{-2} \ln n)$ dimensions while preserving all pairwise distances to within $1 \pm \varepsilon$. Each input point $…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Fast Optimal Locally Private Mean Estimation via Random Projections

NeurIPS 2023poster

We study the problem of locally private mean estimation of high-dimensional vectors in the Euclidean ball. Existing algorithms for this problem either incur sub-optimal error or have high communication and/or run-time complexity. We propose a new algorithmic framework, namely ProjUnit, for private m…

2023

Tricking the Hashing Trick: A Tight Lower Bound on the Robustness of CountSketch to Adaptive Inputs

AAAI 2023technical

CountSketch and Feature Hashing (the ``hashing trick'') are popular randomized dimensionality reduction methods that support recovery of l2 -heavy hitters and approximate inner products. When the inputs are not adaptive (do not depend on prior outputs), classic estimators applied to a sketch of si…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2022

Estimation of Entropy in Constant Space with Improved Sample Complexity

NeurIPS 2022accept

Recent work of Acharya et al.~(NeurIPS 2019) showed how to estimate the entropy of a distribution $\mathcal D$ over an alphabet of size $k$ up to $\pm\epsilon$ additive error by streaming over $(k/\epsilon^3) \cdot \text{polylog}(1/\epsilon)$ i.i.d.\ samples and using only $O(1)$ words of memory. In…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

Private frequency estimation via projective geometry

ICML 2022spotlight

In this work, we propose a new algorithm ProjectiveGeometryResponse (PGR) for locally differentially private (LDP) frequency estimation. For universe size of k and with n users, our eps-LDP algorithm has communication cost ceil(log_2 k) and computation cost O(n + k\exp(eps) log k) for the server to…

2022

Sketching based Representations for Robust Image Classification with Provable Guarantees

NeurIPS 2022accept

How do we provably represent images succinctly so that their essential latent attributes are correctly captured by the representation to as high level of detail as possible? While today's deep networks (such as CNNs) produce image embeddings they do not have any provable properties and seem to work…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2019

Margin-Based Generalization Lower Bounds for Boosted Classifiers

NeurIPS 2019poster

Boosting is one of the most successful ideas in machine learning. The most well-accepted explanations for the low generalization error of boosting algorithms such as AdaBoost stem from margin theory. The study of margins in the context of boosting algorithms was initiated by Schapire, Freund, Bart…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar