arXiv AI By Zhenhua Liu, Zhanxu Xie, Junjie Yu, Tong Zhu, Lijun Li, Wenliang Chen

Demystifying the Privacy-Utility Trade-off in LLM Interactions

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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.

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arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

PrivacyFlow: Privacy in AI Agents through Information Flow Analysis and Consequence-Aware Risk Management

PrivacyFlow introduces a new benchmark, PrivacyBench, and a defense system that separates privacy planning from task execution in autonomous LLM agents. The system traces data provenance, models recipient knowledge, and simulates inference attacks to weigh disclosure risk against task utility, allowing it to minimize or block data sharing. Experiments show that PrivacyFlow reduces privacy failures and increases completed task sequences by 22–55 percentage points, while revealing a tradeoff between privacy, utility, and user autonomy.

By Robin Staab, Tom Wollschl\"ager, Vahab Mirrokni, Reza Shokri