Optimal Regret of Bandits under Differential Privacy

Neural Information Processing Systems 

As sequential learning algorithms are increasingly applied to real life, ensuring data privacy while maintaining their utilities emerges as a timely question. In this context, regret minimisation in stochastic bandits under $\epsilon$-global Differential Privacy (DP) has been widely studied. The present literature poses a significant gap between the best-known regret lower and upper bound in this setting, though they ``match in order''. Thus, we revisit the regret lower and upper bounds of $\epsilon$-global DP bandits and improve both. First, we prove a tighter regret lower bound involving a novel information-theoretic quantity characterising the hardness of $\epsilon$-global DP in stochastic bandits.