arXiv AI

PrivDrift: Auditing User-Secret Leakage Under Topic Drift in Active LLM Conversations

PrivDrift is a benchmark that tests whether user‑disclosed secrets can still be recovered by large language models after the conversation shifts to unrelated topics. It includes 1,000 controlled multi‑turn dialogues with seeded secrets, topic‑drift turns, and standardized extraction probes. Experiments on three LLMs with extended context windows show that dialogue‑level leakage remains substantial—between 38.7% and 54.6%—and is influenced by model, secret type, and persuasion intensity, while additional topic drift does not reliably reduce leakage.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

The Model's Tell: Measuring Context-Leakage Attack Signals with Behavior Gauges

The paper introduces LeakGauge, a method that appends a suffix to a model’s input to gauge the risk of context leakage before decoding. By mapping prefill token probabilities to an attack‑risk score, LeakGauge achieves high AUROC (0.944–0.996) across 11 large language models, including GLM‑5.2 and Kimi‑K3, and remains robust to language changes and different attack styles. The approach also demonstrates sensitivity to internal leakage directions and can be implemented with fewer than 0.5K additional parameters and minimal latency.

By Maosen Zhang, Jianshuo Dong, Boting Lu, Wenyue Li, Xiaoping Zhang, Tianwei Zhang, Jie Zhang, Han Qiu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

VoxPrivacy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Interactional Privacy of Speech Language Models

The paper introduces VoxPrivacy, a benchmark for assessing interactional privacy in Speech Language Models (SLMs). It evaluates models on a 32‑hour bilingual dataset across three difficulty tiers, revealing that most open‑source SLMs perform near random on conditional privacy decisions and even strong closed‑source systems struggle with proactive privacy inference. The authors also validate these findings on a real‑speech subset and show that fine‑tuning on a 4,000‑hour training set can improve privacy‑preserving capabilities while maintaining robustness.

By Yuxiang Wang, Hongyu Liu, Dekun Chen, Xueyao Zhang, Zhizheng Wu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

Inadvertent Context Leakage in Language Models

For AI agents to be useful beyond simple chat, they must hold sensitive user context such as calendars, credentials, health records, and financial data. We study whether the mere presence of such secrets in a model's context window introduces hidden correlations into the model's benign outputs, allowing reconstruction even when the model correctly refuses direct extraction.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

LLMs Can't Play Hangman: On the Necessity of a Private Working Memory for Language Agents

The paper argues that large language models (LLMs) lack a private working memory, which is essential for tasks that require hidden state, such as interactive games. It introduces Private State Interactive Tasks (PSITs) and proves that chat-based LLMs cannot maintain a secret state while producing consistent public responses. Empirical tests confirm that standard LLMs and retrieval-based baselines fail, while a new architecture with explicit private memory succeeds.

By Davide Baldelli, Ali Parviz, Amal Zouaq, Sarath Chandar
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

When Helpful Context Leaks: Privacy Risks in Domain-Adapted ASR

SpeechLLMs used in professional settings often undergo domain customisation through prompts or fine‑tuning, which can inadvertently cause the model to transcribe phonetically similar words from its context or training data, leaking private information. The authors systematically investigate this overlooked privacy risk, creating benchmarks to measure leakage rates for both prompting and fine‑tuning, and find that both mechanisms cause measurable leakage that compounds when combined. They evaluate a prompt‑level mitigation strategy and analyse the accuracy‑leakage trade‑off, concluding that fine‑tuning without context prompts offers the best balance between performance and privacy.

By Maike Z\"ufle, Jan Niehues
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

DP-MemView: A Memory Interface for Attribute-Level Transcript Privacy in Long-Term LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 03130v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-term memory enables persistent personalization in LLM agents, but repeated memory-conditioned responses can cumulatively reveal protected attributes even when they are never stated explicitly.

By Jong Wook Kim, Byoungjae Min, Kennedy Edemacu, Yoonhyuk Choi, Sae-Hong Cho, Beakcheol Jang