arXiv AI

Demystifying the Privacy-Utility Trade-off in LLM Interactions

The paper investigates how privacy-preserving sanitization of user context in large language model (LLM) interactions affects downstream performance. It identifies three mechanisms—Context‑Dependent Utility, Strategic Adaptation, and Combinatorial Interplay—that explain when and how to sanitize data. Based on these insights, the authors propose an intent‑driven local protection framework using a lightweight model (Veilmind‑4B) to dynamically extract, sanitize, and restore context, achieving lower privacy leakage while maintaining higher utility than existing baselines.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

Need to Know: Contextual-Integrity-Grounded Query Rewriting for Privacy-Conscious LLM Delegation

arXiv:2606. 04067v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLMs become increasingly woven into everyday workflows, user queries sent to cloud hosted LLMs routinely mix task-essential content with task non-essential sensitive disclosures, yet type based PII redaction is context agnostic and may raise two issues: over disclosing untyped sensitive context and over removing answer bearing spans.

By Xinyue Huang, Xiaochun Cao, Wenyuan Yang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

On the Impact of Anonymization on the Performance of Large Language Models

The paper systematically studies how anonymizing input data affects large language models (LLMs). Five prominent LLMs were evaluated on eleven benchmarks, comparing performance on original versus pseudonymized inputs. Results show that anonymization generally degrades performance, with larger drops for more capable models and task-dependent effects; reversible anonymization preserves entity uniqueness better than irreversible redaction, and prompting about anonymization offers no benefit.

By Tobias Deu{\ss}er, Max Hahnb\"uck, Lorenz Sparrenberg, Tobias Uelwer, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa
arXiv AI
Aug 3

TextCloak: Thwarting Unauthorized LLM Exploitation via RL-Driven Unlearnable Text

arXiv:2607. 28862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant advances across a wide range of language tasks, while simultaneously raising growing concerns about unauthorized data exploitation and privacy leakage.

By Chengshuai Zhao, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Zhiyuan Yu, Zhen Tan, Huan Liu