Tootfinder

$(\ell,\delta)$-Diversity: Linkage-Robustness via a Composition Theorem
V. Arvind Rameshwar, Anshoo Tandon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18405 https://…

$(\ell,δ)$-Diversity: Linkage-Robustness via a Composition Theorem
In this paper, we consider the problem of degradation of anonymity upon linkages of anonymized datasets. We work in the setting where an adversary links together $t\geq 2$ anonymized datasets in which a user of interest participates, based on the user's known quasi-identifiers, which motivates the use of $\ell$-diversity as the notion of dataset anonymity. We first argue that in the worst case, such linkage attacks can reveal the exact sensitive attribute of the user, even when each dataset res…

Kernel-based Equalized Odds: A Quantification of Accuracy-Fairness Trade-off in Fair Representation Learning
Yijin Ni, Xiaoming Huo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15084 https://

Kernel-based Equalized Odds: A Quantification of Accuracy-Fairness Trade-off in Fair Representation Learning
This paper introduces a novel kernel-based formulation of the Equalized Odds (EO) criterion, denoted as $EO_k$, for fair representation learning (FRL) in supervised settings. The central goal of FRL is to mitigate discrimination regarding a sensitive attribute $S$ while preserving prediction accuracy for the target variable $Y$. Our proposed criterion enables a rigorous and interpretable quantification of three core fairness objectives: independence (prediction $\hat{Y}$ is independent of $S$),…

Through Their Eyes: User Perceptions on Sensitive Attribute Inference of Social Media Videos by Visual Language Models
Shuning Zhang, Gengrui Zhang, Yibo Meng, Ziyi Zhang, Hantao Zhao, Xin Yi, Hewu Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07658

Through Their Eyes: User Perceptions on Sensitive Attribute Inference of Social Media Videos by Visual Language Models
The rapid advancement of Visual Language Models (VLMs) has enabled sophisticated analysis of visual content, leading to concerns about the inference of sensitive user attributes and subsequent privacy risks. While technical capabilities of VLMs are increasingly studied, users' understanding, perceptions, and reactions to these inferences remain less explored, especially concerning videos uploaded on the social media. This paper addresses this gap through a semi-structured interview (N=17), inve…

On the Consistency and Performance of the Iterative Bayesian Update
Ehab ElSalamouny, Catuscia Palamidessi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09980 https://arxiv.o…

On the Consistency and Performance of the Iterative Bayesian Update
For many social, scientific, and commercial purposes, it is often important to estimate the distribution of the users' data regarding a sensitive attribute, e.g., their ages, locations, etc. To allow this estimation while protecting the users' privacy, every user applies a local privacy protection mechanism that releases a noisy (sanitized) version of their original datum to the data collector; then the original distribution is estimated using one of the known methods, such as the matrix invers…

Information-Theoretic Fairness with A Bounded Statistical Parity Constraint
Amirreza Zamani, Abolfazl Changizi, Ragnar Thobaben, Mikael Skoglund
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12847

Information-Theoretic Fairness with A Bounded Statistical Parity Constraint
In this paper, we study an information-theoretic problem of designing a fair representation that attains bounded statistical (demographic) parity. More specifically, an agent uses some useful data $X$ to solve a task $T$. Since both $X$ and $T$ are correlated with some sensitive attribute or secret $S$, the agent designs a representation $Y$ that satisfies a bounded statistical parity and/or privacy leakage constraint, that is, such that $I(Y;S) \leq ε$. Here, we relax the perfect demographic …