arXiv AI

A Causal Perspective on the Role of Training Dynamics for Interpreting Privacy Risks in Code Models

The paper investigates how different types of personally identifiable information (PII) are learned and leaked by large language models for code (LLM4Code). By creating a diverse PII dataset, fine‑tuning models of various scales, and analyzing training dynamics through a structural causal model, the authors find that leakage risk varies by PII type—easy‑to‑learn data such as IP addresses leak more often, while harder types like keys and passwords leak less. The study provides causal evidence that leakage risks are type‑dependent and suggests that defenses should be tailored to specific PII categories and their learnability.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

Code-Poisoning Property Inference Attacks

arXiv:2607. 15970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The flourishing code hosting platforms and coding agents enable even beginners with private data to build tailored Machine Learning (ML) models using available code quickly.

By Xukun Luan, Yuhui Gong, Gang Zhang, Zixuan Huang, Yuanguo Bi, Xuesong Li, Jinyan Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Reconstruction of Personally Identifiable Information from Proprietary Data in Supervised Fine-Tuned Models

The paper examines how supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can leak personally identifiable information (PII) when the fine-tuning data contains user-provided sensitive details. It introduces COVA, a coverage-aware decoding algorithm that improves targeted PII reconstruction from SFT models, especially when an adversary has limited contextual knowledge about a target. Experiments on medical and legal Q&A datasets show that even small proprietary SFT datasets can lead to significant privacy leakage via PII reconstruction.

By Sae Furukawa, Alina Oprea
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Conformal Privacy Auditing: Calibrated Re-identification Attacks with Statistical Guarantees

Conformal Privacy Auditing (CPA) is a distribution‑free framework that calibrates re‑identification risk for each released document against large language model (LLM)‑empowered adversaries. It outputs a conformal ambiguity set of candidate identities that is guaranteed to contain the true identity with a user‑chosen confidence level under exchangeability, along with an interpretable leakage proxy derived from the set size. CPA supports both logit‑access and sampling‑only attackers, enabling audits of both open‑source and proprietary models, and demonstrates calibrated coverage across various benchmarks and attacker configurations.

By Shuo Huang, Gholamreza Haffari, Xingliang Yuan, Ting Yu, Lizhen Qu
arXiv AI
Oct 27

InferPriv: Evaluating Inferential Privacy Leakage in LLM Assistants

InferPriv is a new benchmark that evaluates inferential privacy leakage in large language model (LLM) assistants. It measures whether an honest-but-curious recipient can deduce a user’s sensitive attributes from an LLM’s reply during routine tasks, a type of leakage not captured by existing direct‑leakage benchmarks. Testing five frontier models, the study finds that inferential leakage rates (16.2–25.2%) far exceed direct leakage, even when direct leakage is near zero under privacy‑aware prompts.

By Pengrun Huang, Yiwei Fu, Luoxi Meng, Kamalika Chaudhuri