arXiv AI
Oct 28

TextCloak: Safeguarding Data from Unauthorized LLM Fine-Tuning via RL-Driven Unlearnable Examples

TextCloak is a reinforcement‑learning driven framework that generates unlearnable examples (UEs) to protect textual data from unauthorized fine‑tuning of large language models (LLMs). It transforms clean text into perturbations that preserve meaning and naturalness while degrading the utility of models trained on them. Experiments on six datasets and nine LLMs show that TextCloak consistently impairs unauthorized fine‑tuning and remains robust across different architectures, training settings, and adaptive attacks.

By Chengshuai Zhao, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Zhiyuan Yu, Zhen Tan, Huan Liu