Large Language Models are Advanced Anonymizers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Staab, Robin, Vero, Mark, Balunović, Mislav, Vechev, Martin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Staab, Robin
Vero, Mark
Balunović, Mislav
Vechev, Martin
author_facet Staab, Robin
Vero, Mark
Balunović, Mislav
Vechev, Martin
contents Recent privacy research on large language models (LLMs) has shown that they achieve near-human-level performance at inferring personal data from online texts. With ever-increasing model capabilities, existing text anonymization methods are currently lacking behind regulatory requirements and adversarial threats. In this work, we take two steps to bridge this gap: First, we present a new setting for evaluating anonymization in the face of adversarial LLM inferences, allowing for a natural measurement of anonymization performance while remedying some of the shortcomings of previous metrics. Then, within this setting, we develop a novel LLM-based adversarial anonymization framework leveraging the strong inferential capabilities of LLMs to inform our anonymization procedure. We conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of adversarial anonymization across 13 LLMs on real-world and synthetic online texts, comparing it against multiple baselines and industry-grade anonymizers. Our evaluation shows that adversarial anonymization outperforms current commercial anonymizers both in terms of the resulting utility and privacy. We support our findings with a human study (n=50) highlighting a strong and consistent human preference for LLM-anonymized texts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_13846
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Large Language Models are Advanced Anonymizers
Staab, Robin
Vero, Mark
Balunović, Mislav
Vechev, Martin
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
I.2.7
Recent privacy research on large language models (LLMs) has shown that they achieve near-human-level performance at inferring personal data from online texts. With ever-increasing model capabilities, existing text anonymization methods are currently lacking behind regulatory requirements and adversarial threats. In this work, we take two steps to bridge this gap: First, we present a new setting for evaluating anonymization in the face of adversarial LLM inferences, allowing for a natural measurement of anonymization performance while remedying some of the shortcomings of previous metrics. Then, within this setting, we develop a novel LLM-based adversarial anonymization framework leveraging the strong inferential capabilities of LLMs to inform our anonymization procedure. We conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of adversarial anonymization across 13 LLMs on real-world and synthetic online texts, comparing it against multiple baselines and industry-grade anonymizers. Our evaluation shows that adversarial anonymization outperforms current commercial anonymizers both in terms of the resulting utility and privacy. We support our findings with a human study (n=50) highlighting a strong and consistent human preference for LLM-anonymized texts.
title Large Language Models are Advanced Anonymizers
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13846