On Estimating the Strength of Differentially Private Mechanisms in a Black-Box Setting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We analyze to what extent final users can infer information about the level of protection of their data when the data obfuscation mechanism is a priori unknown to them (the so-called “black-box” scenario). In particular, we explore four notions of differential privacy, namely local/central "-DP/Renyi- ´ DP. On the one hand, we prove that, without any assumption on the underlying distributions, it is not possible to have an algorithm able to infer the level of data protection with provable guarantees. On the other hand, we demonstrate that, under reasonable assumptions (namely Lipschitzness of the involved densities on a closed interval), such guarantees exist for the local versions and can be achieved by a simple histogrambased estimator. We validate our results experimentally and note that, in two particularly well behaved distributions (namely the Laplace and the Gaussian noise), our method performs better than expected, in the sense that in practice the number of samples needed to achieve the desired confidence is smaller than the theoretical bound, and the estimate of ∊ is more precise than predicted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.180 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".