The Permute-and-Flip Mechanism is Identical to Report-Noisy-Max with Exponential Noise

Zeyu Ding, Daniel Kifer, Sayed M. Saghaian N. E., Thomas Steinke, Yuxin Wang, Yingtai Xiao, Danfeng Zhang

Abstract: The permute-and-flip mechanism is a recently proposed differentially private selection algorithm that was shown to outperform the exponential mechanism. In this paper, we show that permute-and-flip is equivalent to the well-known report noisy max algorithm with exponential noise.