Papers › Optimal Obfuscation Mechanisms via Machine Learning
Optimal Obfuscation Mechanisms via Machine Learning
Marco Romanelli, Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis, Catuscia Palamidessi
We consider the problem of obfuscating sensitive information while preserving utility, and we propose a machine learning approach inspired by the generative adversarial networks paradigm. The idea is to set up two nets: the generator, that tries to produce an optimal obfuscation mechanism to protect the data, and the classifier, that tries to de-obfuscate the data. By letting the two nets compete against each other, the mechanism improves its degree of protection, until an equilibrium is reached. We apply our method to the case of location privacy, and we perform experiments on synthetic data and on real data from the Gowalla dataset. We evaluate the privacy of the mechanism not only by its capacity to defeat the classifier, but also in terms of the Bayes error, which represents the strongest possible adversary. We compare the privacy-utility tradeoff of our method to that of the planar Laplace mechanism used in geo-indistinguishability, showing favorable results. Like the Laplace mechanism, our system can be deployed at the user end for protecting his location.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections