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Documents authored by Harrison, Charlie

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2026.3
Exact zCDP Characterizations for Fundamental Differentially Private Mechanisms

Authors: Charlie Harrison and Pasin Manurangsi

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 368, 7th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2026)

Abstract
Zero-concentrated differential privacy (zCDP) is a variant of differential privacy (DP) that is widely used partly due to its nice composition property. While a tight conversion from ε-DP to zCDP exists for the worst-case mechanism, many common algorithms satisfy stronger guarantees. In this work, we derive tight zCDP characterizations for several fundamental mechanisms. We prove that the tight zCDP bound for the ε-DP Laplace mechanism is exactly ε + e^{-ε} - 1, confirming a recent conjecture by Wang [Yu-Xiang Wang, 2022]. We further provide tight bounds for the discrete Laplace mechanism, k-Randomized Response (for k ≤ 6), and RAPPOR. Lastly, we also provide a tight zCDP bound for the worst case bounded range mechanism.
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Charlie Harrison and Pasin Manurangsi. Exact zCDP Characterizations for Fundamental Differentially Private Mechanisms. In 7th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 368, pp. 3:1-3:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{harrison_et_al:LIPIcs.FORC.2026.3,
  author =	{Harrison, Charlie and Manurangsi, Pasin},
  title =	{{Exact zCDP Characterizations for Fundamental Differentially Private Mechanisms}},
  booktitle =	{7th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2026)},
  pages =	{3:1--3:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-419-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{368},
  editor =	{Lin, Huijia (Rachel)},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2026.3},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-259741},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2026.3},
  annote =	{Keywords: Zero-Concentrated Differentially Privacy, Laplace Mechanism, Randomized Response}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2026.16
Optimal Partition Selection with Rényi Differential Privacy

Authors: Charlie Harrison and Pasin Manurangsi

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 368, 7th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2026)

Abstract
A common problem in private data analysis is the partition selection problem, where each user holds a set of partitions (e.g. keys in a GROUP BY operation) from a possibly unbounded set. The challenge here is in maximizing the set of released partitions while respecting a differential privacy constraint. Previous work [Desfontaines et al., 2021] presented an optimal (ε, δ)-DP algorithm when each user submits only a single partition. We generalize this approach to find the optimal algorithm under δ-approximate (α, ε)-Rényi differential privacy (RDP), which allows much tighter analysis under composition. Motivated by the non-existence of a general optimality result in the case where users submit multiple partitions each, we present an extension of our optimal algorithm tuned for L² bounded weighted partition selection which can be used as a drop-in improvement over the Gaussian mechanism any time the partition frequency is not also needed. We show that our primitive can be easily plugged into state of the art partition selection algorithms (PolicyGaussian from [Gopi et al., 2020] and MAD2R from [Justin Y. Chen et al., 2025]), improving performance both for parallel and sequential adaptive algorithms. Finally, we show that there is an inherent cost to algorithms which do support releasing the frequency as well as the partitions. Specifically, we formulate a basic notion of optimal approximate RDP algorithm for partition selection using additive noise, and show that there is a numerical separation between additive and non-additive noise mechanisms for this problem.
Cite as

Charlie Harrison and Pasin Manurangsi. Optimal Partition Selection with Rényi Differential Privacy. In 7th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 368, pp. 16:1-16:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{harrison_et_al:LIPIcs.FORC.2026.16,
  author =	{Harrison, Charlie and Manurangsi, Pasin},
  title =	{{Optimal Partition Selection with R\'{e}nyi Differential Privacy}},
  booktitle =	{7th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2026)},
  pages =	{16:1--16:22},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-419-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{368},
  editor =	{Lin, Huijia (Rachel)},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2026.16},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-259894},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2026.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: Differentially Privacy, Partition Selection, Renyi Differentially Privacy}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2025.12
Infinitely Divisible Noise for Differential Privacy: Nearly Optimal Error in the High ε Regime

Authors: Charlie Harrison and Pasin Manurangsi

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 329, 6th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2025)

Abstract
Differential privacy (DP) can be achieved in a distributed manner, where multiple parties add independent noise such that their sum protects the overall dataset with DP. A common technique here is for each party to sample their noise from the decomposition of an infinitely divisible distribution. We analyze two mechanisms in this setting: 1) the generalized discrete Laplace (GDL) mechanism, whose distribution (which is closed under summation) follows from differences of i.i.d. negative binomial shares, and 2) the multi-scale discrete Laplace (MSDLap) mechanism, a novel mechanism following the sum of multiple i.i.d. discrete Laplace shares at different scales. For ε ≥ 1, our mechanisms can be parameterized to have O(Δ³ e^{-ε}) and O(min(Δ³ e^{-ε}, Δ² e^{-2ε/3})) MSE, respectively, where Δ denote the sensitivity; the latter bound matches known optimality results. Furthermore, the MSDLap mechanism has the optimal MSE including constants as ε → ∞. We also show a transformation from the discrete setting to the continuous setting, which allows us to transform both mechanisms to the continuous setting and thereby achieve the optimal O(Δ² e^{-2ε / 3}) MSE. To our knowledge, these are the first infinitely divisible additive noise mechanisms that achieve order-optimal MSE under pure DP for either the discrete or continuous setting, so our work shows formally there is no separation in utility when query-independent noise adding mechanisms are restricted to infinitely divisible noise. For the continuous setting, our result improves upon Pagh and Stausholm’s Arete distribution which gives an MSE of O(Δ² e^{-ε/4}) [Pagh and Stausholm, 2022]. Furthermore, we give an exact sampler tuned to efficiently implement the MSDLap mechanism, and we apply our results to improve a state of the art multi-message shuffle DP protocol from [Balle et al., 2020] in the high ε regime.
Cite as

Charlie Harrison and Pasin Manurangsi. Infinitely Divisible Noise for Differential Privacy: Nearly Optimal Error in the High ε Regime. In 6th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 329, pp. 12:1-12:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{harrison_et_al:LIPIcs.FORC.2025.12,
  author =	{Harrison, Charlie and Manurangsi, Pasin},
  title =	{{Infinitely Divisible Noise for Differential Privacy: Nearly Optimal Error in the High \epsilon Regime}},
  booktitle =	{6th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2025)},
  pages =	{12:1--12:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-367-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{329},
  editor =	{Bun, Mark},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2025.12},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231396},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2025.12},
  annote =	{Keywords: Differential Privacy, Distributed Noise Addition}
}
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