Understanding the Sparse Vector Technique for Differential Privacy

Summary: Analyzes SVT variants for differential privacy, exposing flaws and misunderstandings across interactive and non-interactive settings. Proposes a tighter SVT with improved utility; in non-interactive DP, EM outperforms SVT, while interactive gains vary. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 11559
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 8.1653216e-05
Overall Rank: 2,758 | 80.82%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,806	CryptEpsilon: Crypto-Assisted Differential Privacy on Untrusted Servers	2020	SIGMOD	8.0911177e-05
3,104	Computing Local Sensitivities of Counting Queries with Joins	2020	SIGMOD	7.5578613e-05
7,034	A Neural Database for Differentially Private Spatial Range Queries	2022	VLDB	4.8550912e-05
7,940	DPGraph: A Benchmark Platform for Differentially Private Graph Analysis	2021	SIGMOD	4.613363e-05
8,522	Differentially Private Hierarchical Heavy Hitters	2024	PODS	4.4937074e-05
9,033	Unleash the Power of Ellipsis: Accuracy-enhanced Sparse Vector Technique with Exponential Noise	2025	VLDB	4.4039656e-05
9,148	SPAS: Continuous Release of Data Streams under w-Event Differential Privacy	2025	SIGMOD	4.3849295e-05
9,417	Free Gap Information from the Differentially Private Sparse Vector and Noisy Max Mechanisms	2020	VLDB	4.3441378e-05
9,512	Answering Private Linear Queries Adaptively using the Common Mechanism	2023	VLDB	4.3335882e-05
10,499	Privacy and Accuracy-Aware AI/ML Model Deduplication	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
11,143	DP-PQD: Privately Detecting Per-Query Gaps In Synthetic Data Generated By Black-Box Mechanisms	2024	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
136	Revealing Information while Preserving Privacy	2003	PODS	0.0004241101
1,446	PrivBayes: Private Data Release via Bayesian Networks	2014	SIGMOD	0.0001194108
1,520	PrivTree: A Differentially Private Algorithm for Hierarchical Decompositions	2016	SIGMOD	0.00011535148

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6,486	Differential Privacy in Data Publication and Analysis	2012	SIGMOD	5.0445043e-05
9,512	Answering Private Linear Queries Adaptively using the Common Mechanism	2023	VLDB	4.3335882e-05
8,930	Privacy Preservation by Disassociation	2012	VLDB	4.427232e-05
10,041	A General Framework for Per-record Differential Privacy	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,992	Personalized Truncation for Personalized Privacy	2024	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
3,381	Privacy-preserving Anonymization of Set-valued Data	2008	VLDB	7.1604078e-05
2,274	An Adaptive Mechanism for Accurate Query Answering under Differential Privacy	2012	VLDB	9.1297703e-05
3,097	Publishing Set-Valued Data via Differential Privacy	2011	VLDB	7.5647028e-05
9,417	Free Gap Information from the Differentially Private Sparse Vector and Noisy Max Mechanisms	2020	VLDB	4.3441378e-05
9,033	Unleash the Power of Ellipsis: Accuracy-enhanced Sparse Vector Technique with Exponential Noise	2025	VLDB	4.4039656e-05