arXiv Computation and Language

Exploring The Empirical Privacy Landscape of Synthetic Data

The paper compares data-level and training-level methods for balancing language model capability and privacy leakage on synthetic medical records with embedded canaries. Direct finetuning achieves the highest capability but leaks the most private information, while DP‑SGD reduces leakage at a significant cost to performance. Generating privacy‑aware synthetic data—especially with uniqueness‑aware rewriting—offers a better trade‑off, and more capable rewriting models tend to lower downstream privacy risks, though gains are inconsistent with increased compute.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Rethinking Anonymity Claims in Synthetic Data Generation: A Model-Centric Privacy Attack Perspective

The paper argues that evaluating anonymity in synthetic data generation must focus on the generative model rather than just the resulting dataset. It interprets GDPR definitions of personal data and anonymization under realistic model-access scenarios, mapping these to state‑of‑the‑art privacy attacks. The authors conclude that synthetic data alone is insufficient for anonymization, and that Differential Privacy offers stronger protection than Similarity‑based Privacy Metrics.

By Georgi Ganev, Emiliano De Cristofaro
arXiv AI
5d ago

FedSumUp: User-Auditable Privacy-Aware Representation Sharing for Resource-Constrained Federated Intelligence

FedSumUp introduces a learnable lossy compressor that generates compact, visually interpretable representations on client devices, reducing privacy leakage and computational overhead. The compressor is trained on the server using a data‑free closed‑loop optimization that minimizes the difference between original and twice‑compressed representations after upsampling. Experiments on BloodMNIST, CIFAR‑10, and ChestMNIST show low reconstruction PSNR, significant client runtime reductions, and competitive classification accuracy while remaining robust to non‑IID data.

By Jingwei Zhao, Tiantong Sun, Yuanyuan Song, Jinhuan Guo, Wei Zishuo, Shengyu Huang, Ziyuan Ren, Wei Chen, Xiaojin Zhang
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 AI
Jun 18

PSyGenTAB: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Synthetic Clinical Tabular Data Generation via Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606. 18518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of medical AI is constrained by limited access to high-quality clinical data due to institutional silos and strict privacy regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR.

By Arshia Ilaty, Hossein Shirazi, Manasi Chitale, Kedar Hegde, Dhanalakshmi Ramesh, Rashmi S. Manjunath, Amir Rahmani, Hajar Homayouni