AIM: An Adaptive and Iterative Mechanism for Differentially Private Synthetic Data

Summary: AIM is a workload-adaptive DP synthetic-data generator that iteratively selects measurements, privately measures them, and yields data from noisy results. It links measurement choice to workload relevance and data-approximation, provides high-probability per-query error bounds, and outperforms existing DP mechanisms. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12937
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 8.0637668e-05
Overall Rank: 2,841 | 80.51%
DOI: 10.14778/3551793.3551817

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Ryan McKenna (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
2. Brett Mullins (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
3. Daniel Sheldon (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
4. Gerome Miklau (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

BibTeX Citation

@article{mckenna_vldb22,
        title = {{AIM: An Adaptive and Iterative Mechanism for Differentially Private Synthetic Data}},
        author = {McKenna, Ryan and Mullins, Brett and Sheldon, Daniel and Miklau, Gerome},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '22},
        volume = {15},
        number = {11},
        pages = {2599--2612},
        doi = {10.14778/3551793.3551817},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3551793.3551817},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,909	Differentially Private Data Generation with Missing Data	2024	VLDB	5.5181056e-05
8,514	Synthetic Tabular Data: Methods, Attacks and Defenses	2025	VLDB	5.4119882e-05
9,602	Answering Private Linear Queries Adaptively using the Common Mechanism	2023	VLDB	5.2487195e-05
10,254	HeteroFedSyn: Differentially Private Tabular Data Synthesis for Heterogeneous Federated Settings	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,282	Prism: Private Relational Data Synthesis with Language Models	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,345	Benchmarking Differentially Private Tabular Data Synthesis: [Experiments & Analysis]	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,775	PrivPetal: Relational Data Synthesis via Permutation Relations	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,967	Privacy-Enhanced Database Synthesis for Benchmark Publishing	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,130	Continual Release of Differentially Private Synthetic Data from Longitudinal Data Collections	2024	PODS	5.093636e-05
11,349	DP-PQD: Privately Detecting Per-Query Gaps In Synthetic Data Generated By Black-Box Mechanisms	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,459	Epistemic Parity: Reproducibility as an Evaluation Metric for Differential Privacy	2023	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
123	Revealing Information while Preserving Privacy	2003	PODS	0.00031082693
775	Differentially Private Data Cubes: Optimizing Noise Sources and Consistency	2011	SIGMOD	0.00014110531
2,167	Optimizing error of high-dimensional statistical queries under differential privacy	2018	VLDB	9.047803e-05
2,300	Principled Evaluation of Differentially Private Algorithms using DPBench	2016	SIGMOD	8.7833594e-05
2,476	Data Synthesis via Differentially Private Markov Random Fields	2021	VLDB	8.5258582e-05
3,016	Plausible Deniability for Privacy-Preserving Data Synthesis	2017	VLDB	7.8484858e-05
3,412	Kamino: Constraint-Aware Differentially Private Data Synthesis	2021	VLDB	7.4344343e-05
7,924	PSynDB: Accurate and Accessible Private Data Generation	2019	VLDB	5.5181056e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	11,230	AAA: an Adaptive Mechanism for Locally Differentially Private Mean Estimation	2024	VLDB
2	7,924	PSynDB: Accurate and Accessible Private Data Generation	2019	VLDB
3	11,349	DP-PQD: Privately Detecting Per-Query Gaps In Synthetic Data Generated By Black-Box Mechanisms	2024	VLDB
4	7,358	PreFair: Privately Generating Justifiably Fair Synthetic Data	2023	VLDB
5	11,026	PrivEval: a tool for interactive evaluation of privacy metrics in synthetic data generation	2025	VLDB
6	7,909	Differentially Private Data Generation with Missing Data	2024	VLDB
7	2,108	An Adaptive Mechanism for Accurate Query Answering under Differential Privacy	2012	VLDB
8	11,130	Continual Release of Differentially Private Synthetic Data from Longitudinal Data Collections	2024	PODS
9	3,016	Plausible Deniability for Privacy-Preserving Data Synthesis	2017	VLDB
10	10,647	Private Synthetic Data Generation in Bounded Memory	2025	PODS