arXiv AI

Loose Lips: Understanding Privacy Leakage in Agentic Dialogue

arXiv AI
Sep 25

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.

By Luciano Maldonado
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