arXiv AI

"We'll Fix It Later": Education, AI, and the Deferral of Privacy in EdTech

The article "We'll Fix It Later": Education, AI, and the Deferral of Privacy in EdTech examines how educational technology platforms collect sensitive student data but often postpone privacy considerations until later stages of product development. Through 12 interviews and a policy audit of 48 platforms, the study finds that privacy is acknowledged yet deferred in favor of functionality, growth, and funding, with responsibility frequently shifted to cloud providers or downstream institutions. The audit reveals that many platforms lack clear AI disclosures and provide limited governance details, indicating a gap between data collection practices and privacy accountability.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

PEARL: A Task-Aware Framework for Evaluating Differentially Private Synthetic Educational Data

PEARL is a task-aware framework that evaluates differentially private synthetic educational data by checking validity, privacy protection, predictive usefulness, and suitability for the intended educational task. In a study of 96 settings, only 12 datasets passed all PEARL checks, with many failures due to missing outcome groups or distorted learning activity order. Even datasets that met privacy and predictive-usefulness criteria sometimes exhibited fairness issues and failed to support knowledge-tracing models, indicating that privacy alone does not guarantee practical usefulness.

By Xianghui Meng, Yujing Zhang, Jionghao Lin
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Expectations and Practices around AI Disclosure in CS Research

The paper examines AI disclosure policies in top computer science venues, finding them to be highly under‑specified. A survey of 109 researchers shows that disclosures are deemed most necessary for research design tasks and when human involvement is low, and it compiles researchers’ expectations for disclosure content. Analysis of 13,867 disclosure statements from EMNLP 2025 and ICLR 2026 reveals a significant mismatch between these expectations and actual practice, such as frequent disclosure of writing assistance despite it being considered less necessary.

By Arati Mohapatra, Danish Pruthi
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Privacy-Preserving Heterogeneous Multi-LLM Federated Inference for Cognitive Diagnosis

The paper introduces a federated inference framework that enables multiple commercial large language model (LLM) APIs—such as LLaMA‑3.3‑70B, GPT‑4o‑mini, and Claude‑3‑Haiku—to collaborate on cognitive diagnosis tasks without accessing raw student data or proprietary model internals. Each entity’s predictions are perturbed with Laplace noise to provide epsilon‑local differential privacy, and a residual‑based aggregation scheme mitigates model heterogeneity. Experiments on three educational benchmarks demonstrate strong privacy guarantees with minimal accuracy loss, confirming the framework’s practical usability and cross‑domain generalizability.

By Yagna Manasa Boyapati, Chong Yu, Tianyu Jiang, Justin Zhan
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Privacy in Personalized AI Is a System Property, Not Just a Model Property

The paper argues that privacy in personalized AI should be viewed as a system-level issue rather than just a model-level one. It identifies four interconnected privacy‑risk channels in personalized AI and proposes four system‑level requirements—interaction trajectories, internal information flows, indirect leakage, and the privacy‑utility trade‑off—for evaluating privacy. The authors call for these requirements to be systematically incorporated into privacy audits of personalized AI systems.

By Guillaume Salha-Galvan, Jiaying Xu