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arXiv · 2602.17488

Computational Hardness of Private Coreset

Abstract

We study the problem of differentially private (DP) computation of coreset for the $k$-means objective. For a given input set of points, a coreset is another set of points such that the $k$-means objective for any candidate solution is preserved up to a multiplicative $(1 \pm α)$ factor (and some additive factor). We prove the first computational lower bounds for this problem. Specifically, assuming the existence of one-way functions, we show that no polynomial-time $(ε, 1/n^{ω(1)})$-DP algorithm can compute a coreset for $k$-means in the $\ell_\infty$-metric for some constant $α> 0$ (and some constant additive factor), even for $k=3$. For $k$-means in the Euclidean metric, we show a similar result but only for $α= Θ\left(1/d^2\right)$, where $d$ is the dimension.

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BibTeXRIS

Badih Ghazi, Cristóbal Guzmán, Pritish Kamath, Alexander Knop, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi. 2026-02-19. Computational Hardness of Private Coreset. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17488

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