Optimal Guarantees for Auditing Rényi Differentially Private Machine Learning
We study black-box auditing for machine learning algorithms that claim R \ 'enyi differential privacy (RDP) guarantees. We introduce an auditing framework, based on hypothesis testing, that directly estimates Rényi divergence between neighboring executions using the Donsker-Varadhan (DV) variational estimator. Our analysis yields explicit and non-asymptotic confidence intervals for RDP auditing via class-restricted DV estimators, separating statistical estimation error from algorithmic privacy leakage. We prove matching minimax lower bounds showing that, up to logarithmic factors, our sample-complexity guarantees are information-theoretically optimal, thereby establishing the first optima...
| Authors | Benjamin D. Kim, Lav R. Varshney, Daniel Alabi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 21 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 May 2026 |
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