# Wasserstein Differential Privacy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12436/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [Renyi Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07476/) (2017)
- [Concentrated Differential Privacy: Simplifications, Extensions, and Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.02065/) (2016)
- [Statistical Aspects of Wasserstein Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05500/) (2018)
- [Concentrated Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01887/) (2016)
- [DPNAS: Neural Architecture Search for Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08557/) (2021)
- [Differentially Private Sliced Wasserstein Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01848/) (2021)
- [Heterogeneous Gaussian Mechanism: Preserving Differential Privacy in Deep Learning with Provable Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01444/) (2019)
- [Gromov-Wasserstein Discrepancy with Local Differential Privacy for Distributed Structural Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00808/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Learning with Differentially Private (Sliced) Wasserstein Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01701/) (2025)
- [Consistent Estimation of Numerical Distributions under Local Differential Privacy by Wavelet Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19661/) (2025)
- [Balancing Fairness, Privacy, and Accuracy: A Multitask Adversarial Framework for Centralized Data-Driven Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24458/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Differential privacy (DP) has achieved remarkable results in the field of privacy-preserving machine learning. However, existing DP frameworks do not satisfy all the conditions for becoming metrics, which prevents them from deriving better basic private properties and leads to exaggerated values on privacy budgets. We propose Wasserstein differential privacy (WDP), an alternative DP framework to measure the risk of privacy leakage, which satisfies the properties of symmetry and triangle inequality. We show and prove that WDP has 13 excellent properties, which can be theoretical supports for the better performance of WDP than other DP frameworks. In addition, we derive a general privacy accounting method called Wasserstein accountant, which enables WDP to be applied in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) scenarios containing sub-sampling. Experiments on basic mechanisms, compositions and deep learning show that the privacy budgets obtained by Wasserstein accountant are relatively stable and less influenced by order. Moreover, the overestimation on privacy budgets can be effectively alleviated. The code is available at https://github.com/Hifipsysta/WDP.