Differential Privacy and Learning

CS 839 · Spring 2026 · UW–Madison

Tentative Schedule

Tu/Th · 1:00–2:15 PM · Morgridge Hall 6618
Date Topic Lecture Notes Further Reading Homework
Fundamentals
Jan 20 Provable Privacy: Why and How
Jan 22 Privacy Basics I
Jan 27 Privacy Basics II
Jan 29 Differentially Private Gradient Descent
Feb 3 Linear Queries
Feb 5 Beating Global Sensitivity
Feb 10 Inverse Sensitivity
Feb 12 Histograms and the Binary Tree Mechanism
Optimization and Machine Learning
Feb 17 DP Gradient Descent, Again
Feb 19 Rényi Differential Privacy
Feb 24 Amplification by Subsampling and DP-SGD
Feb 26 DP-FTRL, Correlated Noise
Multivariate Statistics
March 3 Mean Estimation; Subsample and Aggregate
March 5 FriendlyCore TCKMS21
March 10 Stable Estimators
Mar 12 Stable Covariance Estimation BHS23, AKTVZ23
Mar 17 The Robustness-to-Privacy Transformation DL09, AUZ22
HKMN22
Mar 19 Sparse Mean Estimation
Mar 24 Fingerprinting Lower Bounds I
Mar 26 Fingerprinting Lower Bounds II
Advanced Topics
Apr 7 Private PAC Learning
Apr 9 Privacy Wrappers
Apr 14 Privacy and Generalization
Apr 16 Amplification by Iteration
Apr 21 Convergent Bounds on Privacy Loss AT22
Apr 23 TBD
Project Presentations
Apr 28 Student Presentations
Apr 30 Student Presentations
May 1 Student Presentations