Jalaj Upadhyay
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jalajupadhyay.bsky.social
Jalaj Upadhyay
@jalajupadhyay.bsky.social
93 followers 96 following 3 posts
Assistant Prof @Rutgers
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Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
uwcheritoncs.bsky.social
Cameron Seth is breaking down the world’s hardest CS problem piece by piece.

“What I’m doing is looking at a series of smaller problems related to the broader P vs. NP problem. Essentially, what I’m asking is if we can solve these other related problems,” Cam says.

uwaterloo.ca/news/mathema...
PhD candidate Cameron Seth in front of a blackboard
November 14, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
dppapers.bsky.social
Spectral Perturbation Bounds for Low-Rank Approximation with Applications to Privacy

Phuc Tran, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi, Van H. Vu

http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25670
Spectral Perturbation Bounds for Low-Rank Approximation with Applications to Privacy Phuc Tran, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi, Van H. Vu http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25670 A central challenge in machine learning is to understand how noise or measurement errors affect low-rank approximations, particularly in the spectral norm. This question is especially important in differentially private low-rank approximation, where one aims to preserve the top-$p$ structure of a data-derived matrix while ensuring privacy. Prior work often analyzes Frobenius norm error or changes in reconstruction quality, but these metrics can over- or under-estimate true subspace distortion. The spectral norm, by contrast, captures worst-case directional error and provides the strongest utility guarantees. We establish new high-probability spectral-norm perturbation bounds for symmetric matrices that refine the classical Eckart--Young--Mirsky theorem and explicitly capture interactions between a matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$ and an arbitrary symmetric perturbation $E$. Under mild eigengap and norm conditions, our bounds yield sharp estimates for $\|(A + E)_p - A_p\|$, where $A_p$ is the best rank-$p$ approximation of $A$, with improvements of up to a factor of $\sqrt{n}$. As an application, we derive improved utility guarantees for differentially private PCA, resolving an open problem in the literature. Our analysis relies on a novel contour bootstrapping method from complex analysis and extends it to a broad class of spectral functionals, including polynomials and matrix exponentials. Empirical results on real-world datasets confirm that our bounds closely track the actual spectral error under diverse perturbation regimes.
October 30, 2025 at 3:53 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
wired.com
A little-known algorithmic process called “differential privacy” helps keep census data anonymous. Conservatives want it gone.
The Republican Plan to Reform the Census Could Put Everyone’s Privacy at Risk
A little-known algorithmic process called “differential privacy” helps keep census data anonymous. Conservatives want it gone.
wrd.cm
October 28, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
gautamkamath.com
Announcing (w @adamsmith.xyz @thejonullman.bsky.social) the 2025 edition of the Foundations of Responsible Computing Job Market Profiles!

Check out 40 job market candidates in mathematical research in computation and society writ large!

Link:
drive.google.com/file/d/1zvsr...
October 20, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
rasmuspagh.net
150 years ago the first women were enrolled at University of Copenhagen. To celebrate, four of my awesome BARC colleagues are arranging the WAVE workshop on October 10th.

Amazing speakers and panelists, full-day catering, and Copenhagen culture night in the evening! Join us!

t.co/zIeUnYVXMC
https://barc.ku.dk/wave-conference/
t.co
September 22, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
dppapers.bsky.social
Normalized Square Root: Sharper Matrix Factorization Bounds for Differentially Private Continual Counting

Monika Henzinger, Nikita P. Kalinin, Jalaj Upadhyay

http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14334
Normalized Square Root: Sharper Matrix Factorization Bounds for Differentially Private Continual Counting Monika Henzinger, Nikita P. Kalinin, Jalaj Upadhyay http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14334 The factorization norms of the lower-triangular all-ones $n \times n$ matrix, $\gamma_2(M_{count})$ and $\gamma_{F}(M_{count})$, play a central role in differential privacy as they are used to give theoretical justification of the accuracy of the only known production-level private training algorithm of deep neural networks by Google. Prior to this work, the best known upper bound on $\gamma_2(M_{count})$ was $1 + \frac{\log n}{\pi}$ by Mathias (Linear Algebra and Applications, 1993), and the best known lower bound was $\frac{1}{\pi}(2 + \log(\frac{2n+1}{3})) \approx 0.507 + \frac{\log n}{\pi}$ (Matou\v{s}ek, Nikolov, Talwar, IMRN 2020), where $\log$ denotes the natural logarithm. Recently, Henzinger and Upadhyay (SODA 2025) gave the first explicit factorization that meets the bound of Mathias (1993) and asked whether there exists an explicit factorization that improves on Mathias' bound. We answer this question in the affirmative. Additionally, we improve the lower bound significantly. More specifically, we show that $$ 0.701 + \frac{\log n}{\pi} + o(1) \;\leq\; \gamma_2(M_{count}) \;\leq\; 0.846 + \frac{\log n}{\pi} + o(1). $$ That is, we reduce the gap between the upper and lower bound to $0.14 + o(1)$. We also show that our factors achieve a better upper bound for $\gamma_{F}(M_{count})$ compared to prior work, and we establish an improved lower bound: $$ 0.701 + \frac{\log n}{\pi} + o(1) \;\leq\; \gamma_{F}(M_{count}) \;\leq\; 0.748 + \frac{\log n}{\pi} + o(1). $$ That is, the gap between the lower and upper bound provided by our explicit factorization is $0.047 + o(1)$.
September 19, 2025 at 3:48 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
thejonullman.bsky.social
📢Adam Smith, @gautamkamath.com, and I are putting together a list of job market candidates in Foundations of Responsible Computing! Last year's list was a great success so we're keeping it going!

If you want to be included, or nominate someone, see link in the replies!
September 15, 2025 at 12:41 PM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
dppapers.bsky.social
Differentially Private Synthetic Graphs Preserving Triangle-Motif Cuts

Pan Peng, Hangyu Xu

http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14835
Differentially Private Synthetic Graphs Preserving Triangle-Motif Cuts Pan Peng, Hangyu Xu http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14835 We study the problem of releasing a differentially private (DP) synthetic graph $G'$ that well approximates the triangle-motif sizes of all cuts of any given graph $G$, where a motif in general refers to a frequently occurring subgraph within complex networks. Non-private versions of such graphs have found applications in diverse fields such as graph clustering, graph sparsification, and social network analysis. Specifically, we present the first $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-DP mechanism that, given an input graph $G$ with $n$ vertices, $m$ edges and local sensitivity of triangles $\ell_{3}(G)$, generates a synthetic graph $G'$ in polynomial time, approximating the triangle-motif sizes of all cuts $(S,V\setminus S)$ of the input graph $G$ up to an additive error of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{m\ell_{3}(G)}n/\varepsilon^{3/2})$. Additionally, we provide a lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{mn}\ell_{3}(G)/\varepsilon)$ on the additive error for any DP algorithm that answers the triangle-motif size queries of all $(S,T)$-cut of $G$. Finally, our algorithm generalizes to weighted graphs, and our lower bound extends to any $K_h$-motif cut for any constant $h\geq 2$.
July 22, 2025 at 3:49 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
dppapers.bsky.social
Breaking the $n^{1.5}$ Additive Error Barrier for Private and Efficient Graph Sparsification via Private Expander Decomposition

Anders Aamand, Justin Y. Chen, Mina Dalirrooyfard, Slobodan Mitrović, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Sandeep Silwal, Yinzhan Xu

http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01873
Breaking the $n^{1.5}$ Additive Error Barrier for Private and Efficient Graph Sparsification via Private Expander Decomposition Anders Aamand, Justin Y. Chen, Mina Dalirrooyfard, Slobodan Mitrović, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Sandeep Silwal, Yinzhan Xu http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01873 We study differentially private algorithms for graph cut sparsification, a fundamental problem in algorithms, privacy, and machine learning. While significant progress has been made, the best-known private and efficient cut sparsifiers on $n$-node graphs approximate each cut within $\widetilde{O}(n^{1.5})$ additive error and $1+\gamma$ multiplicative error for any $\gamma > 0$ [Gupta, Roth, Ullman TCC'12]. In contrast, "inefficient" algorithms, i.e., those requiring exponential time, can achieve an $\widetilde{O}(n)$ additive error and $1+\gamma$ multiplicative error [Eli{\'a}{\v{s}}, Kapralov, Kulkarni, Lee SODA'20]. In this work, we break the $n^{1.5}$ additive error barrier for private and efficient cut sparsification. We present an $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-DP polynomial time algorithm that, given a non-negative weighted graph, outputs a private synthetic graph approximating all cuts with multiplicative error $1+\gamma$ and additive error $n^{1.25 + o(1)}$ (ignoring dependencies on $\varepsilon, \delta, \gamma$). At the heart of our approach lies a private algorithm for expander decomposition, a popular and powerful technique in (non-private) graph algorithms.
July 3, 2025 at 3:48 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
dppapers.bsky.social
On Design Principles for Private Adaptive Optimizers

Arun Ganesh, Brendan McMahan, Abhradeep Thakurta

http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01129
On Design Principles for Private Adaptive Optimizers Arun Ganesh, Brendan McMahan, Abhradeep Thakurta http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01129 The spherical noise added to gradients in differentially private (DP) training undermines the performance of adaptive optimizers like AdaGrad and Adam, and hence many recent works have proposed algorithms to address this challenge. However, the empirical results in these works focus on simple tasks and models and the conclusions may not generalize to model training in practice. In this paper we survey several of these variants, and develop better theoretical intuition for them as well as perform empirical studies comparing them. We find that a common intuition of aiming for unbiased estimates of second moments of gradients in adaptive optimizers is misguided, and instead that a simple technique called scale-then-privatize (which does not achieve unbiased second moments) has more desirable theoretical behaviors and outperforms all other variants we study on a small-scale language model training task. We additionally argue that scale-then-privatize causes the noise addition to better match the application of correlated noise mechanisms which are more desirable to use in practice.
July 3, 2025 at 3:49 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
gautamkamath.com
ICML's election for their board of directors has begun. I've thrown my hat in the ring. Please consider voting for Gautam Kamath.

I have experience with the governance of TMLR, COLT, and ALT, and I think I've demonstrated myself as a consciencious and engaged community member.
June 30, 2025 at 12:44 PM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
barnacs.bsky.social
This year TCS for All Inspiration talk will be given by Sofya Raskhodnikova, Boston University on June 27th at our STOC 2025 TCS for All Meeting. Join us. We are relocating the TCS for All Rising Star Workshop to FOCS 2025 this year. Stay tuned. SIGACT.org/tcsforall/
#stoc2025 @ccanonne.github.io
TCS for All
Theoretical Computer Science without Barriers
SIGACT.org
June 18, 2025 at 2:33 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
dppapers.bsky.social
Correlated Noise Mechanisms for Differentially Private Learning

Krishna Pillutla, Jalaj Upadhyay, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Krishnamurthy Dvijotham, Arun Ganesh, Monika Henzinger, Jonathan Katz, Ryan McKenna, H. Brendan McMahan, Keith Rush, Thomas Steinke, Ab...
http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08201
Correlated Noise Mechanisms for Differentially Private Learning Krishna Pillutla, Jalaj Upadhyay, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Krishnamurthy Dvijotham, Arun Ganesh, Monika Henzinger, Jonathan Katz, Ryan McKenna, H. Brendan McMahan, Keith Rush, Thomas Steinke, Abhradeep Thakurta http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08201 This monograph explores the design and analysis of correlated noise mechanisms for differential privacy (DP), focusing on their application to private training of AI and machine learning models via the core primitive of estimation of weighted prefix sums. While typical DP mechanisms inject independent noise into each step of a stochastic gradient (SGD) learning algorithm in order to protect the privacy of the training data, a growing body of recent research demonstrates that introducing (anti-)correlations in the noise can significantly improve privacy-utility trade-offs by carefully canceling out some of the noise added on earlier steps in subsequent steps. Such correlated noise mechanisms, known variously as matrix mechanisms, factorization mechanisms, and DP-Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (DP-FTRL) when applied to learning algorithms, have also been influential in practice, with industrial deployment at a global scale.
June 11, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
rrwilliams.bsky.social
DIMACS workshop on fine grained hardness of approximation, July 21-23
Information and registration here, looks interesting!
dmac.rutgers.edu/events/detai...
DIMACS :: Details
dmac.rutgers.edu
February 9, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
dppapers.bsky.social
Differentially Private Matchings
Michael Dinitz, George Z. Li, Quanquan C. Liu, Felix Zhou
http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00926
Differentially Private Matchings Michael Dinitz, George Z. Li, Quanquan C. Liu, Felix Zhou http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00926 Computing matchings in general graphs plays a central role in graph algorithms. However, despite the recent interest in differentially private graph algorithms, there has been limited work on private matchings. Moreover, almost all existing work focuses on estimating the size of the maximum matching, whereas in many applications, the matching itself is the object of interest. There is currently only a single work on private algorithms for computing matching solutions by [HHRRW STOC'14]. Moreover, their work focuses on allocation problems and hence is limited to bipartite graphs. Motivated by the importance of computing matchings in sensitive graph data, we initiate the study of differentially private algorithms for computing maximal and maximum matchings in general graphs. We provide a number of algorithms and lower bounds for this problem in different models and settings. We first prove a lower bound showing that computing explicit solutions necessarily incurs large error, even if we try to obtain privacy by allowing ourselves to output non-edges. We then consider implicit solutions, where at the end of the computation there is an ($\varepsilon$-differentially private) billboard and each node can determine its matched edge(s) based on what is written on this publicly visible billboard. For this solution concept, we provide tight upper and lower (bicriteria) bounds, where the degree bound is violated by a logarithmic factor (which we show is necessary). We further show that our algorithm can be made distributed in the local edge DP (LEDP) model, and can even be done in a logarithmic number of rounds if we further relax the degree bounds by logarithmic factors. Our edge-DP matching algorithms give rise to new matching algorithms in the node-DP setting by combining our edge-DP algorithms with a novel use of arboricity sparsifiers. [...]
January 6, 2025 at 4:33 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
rasmuspagh.net
Looking for a PhD position or a post-doc position in theoretical computer science? Consider applying to one of our calls, closing January 10! barc.ku.dk/career/
Career Opportunities – University of Copenhagen
barc.ku.dk
January 6, 2025 at 7:21 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
gautamkamath.com
Happy new year! Guest post on my blog by Abhradeep Thakurta, featuring his perspective on interviewing/hiring for faculty and industry research positions in CS/ML. I add some of my own comments at the end. Comments and perspectives welcome!

kamathematics.wordpress.com/2025/01/02/g...
January 2, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
dppapers.bsky.social
Streaming Private Continual Counting via Binning
Joel Daniel Andersson, Rasmus Pagh
http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07093
Streaming Private Continual Counting via Binning Joel Daniel Andersson, Rasmus Pagh http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07093 In differential privacy, $\textit{continual observation}$ refers to problems in which we wish to continuously release a function of a dataset that is revealed one element at a time. The challenge is to maintain a good approximation while keeping the combined output over all time steps differentially private. In the special case of $\textit{continual counting}$ we seek to approximate a sum of binary input elements. This problem has received considerable attention lately, in part due to its relevance in implementations of differentially private stochastic gradient descent. $\textit{Factorization mechanisms}$ are the leading approach to continual counting, but the best such mechanisms do not work well in $\textit{streaming}$ settings since they require space proportional to the size of the input. In this paper, we present a simple approach to approximating factorization mechanisms in low space via $\textit{binning}$, where adjacent matrix entries with similar values are changed to be identical in such a way that a matrix-vector product can be maintained in sublinear space. Our approach has provable sublinear space guarantees for a class of lower triangular matrices whose entries are monotonically decreasing away from the diagonal. We show empirically that even with very low space usage we are able to closely match, and sometimes surpass, the performance of asymptotically optimal factorization mechanisms. Recently, and independently of our work, Dvijotham et al. have also suggested an approach to implementing factorization mechanisms in a streaming setting. Their work differs from ours in several respects: It only addresses factorization into $\textit{Toeplitz}$ matrices, only considers $\textit{maximum}$ error, and uses a different technique based on rational function approximation that seems less versatile than our binning approach.
December 11, 2024 at 4:34 AM
jalajupadhyay.bsky.social
Another cool work by Joel Andersson and @rasmuspagh.net on low-space continual counting. This result is more general than that in the recent FOCS paper. arxiv.org/abs/2412.07093
Streaming Private Continual Counting via Binning
In differential privacy, $\textit{continual observation}$ refers to problems in which we wish to continuously release a function of a dataset that is revealed one element at a time. The challenge is t...
arxiv.org
December 11, 2024 at 8:07 AM
Reposted by Jalaj Upadhyay
aaroth.bsky.social
If you are on the job market, and work on the kinds of topics that might be published in FORC ("Foundations of Responsible Computing"), fill out this form and get on the job list. This covers mathematical research on privacy, fairness, and related topics.
ccanonne.github.io Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · Nov 18
📢 Some good folks (so, not me :)) in the Foundations of Responsible Computing are putting together a list of people (students and postdocs) on the job market this year. If you or would like to be included, or you would like to nominate someone, use the following form: forms.gle/hn8QyH1y2wbs...
FORC Job List 2024-2025
If you would like to be included in the "FORC" job list for graduating PhDs, postdocs and other junior researchers, or if you would like to nominate someone, fill out the form below. The intention is ...
forms.gle
November 18, 2024 at 1:49 AM