Universal Zero-shot Embedding Inversion

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Collin, Morris, John X., Shmatikov, Vitaly
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhang, Collin
Morris, John X.
Shmatikov, Vitaly
author_facet Zhang, Collin
Morris, John X.
Shmatikov, Vitaly
contents Embedding inversion, i.e., reconstructing text given its embedding and black-box access to the embedding encoder, is a fundamental problem in both NLP and security. From the NLP perspective, it helps determine how much semantic information about the input is retained in the embedding. From the security perspective, it measures how much information is leaked by vector databases and embedding-based retrieval systems. State-of-the-art methods for embedding inversion, such as vec2text, have high accuracy but require (a) training a separate model for each embedding, and (b) a large number of queries to the corresponding encoder. We design, implement, and evaluate ZSInvert, a zero-shot inversion method based on the recently proposed adversarial decoding technique. ZSInvert is fast, query-efficient, and can be used for any text embedding without training an embedding-specific inversion model. We measure the effectiveness of ZSInvert on several embeddings and demonstrate that it recovers key semantic information about the corresponding texts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00147
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Universal Zero-shot Embedding Inversion
Zhang, Collin
Morris, John X.
Shmatikov, Vitaly
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
Embedding inversion, i.e., reconstructing text given its embedding and black-box access to the embedding encoder, is a fundamental problem in both NLP and security. From the NLP perspective, it helps determine how much semantic information about the input is retained in the embedding. From the security perspective, it measures how much information is leaked by vector databases and embedding-based retrieval systems. State-of-the-art methods for embedding inversion, such as vec2text, have high accuracy but require (a) training a separate model for each embedding, and (b) a large number of queries to the corresponding encoder. We design, implement, and evaluate ZSInvert, a zero-shot inversion method based on the recently proposed adversarial decoding technique. ZSInvert is fast, query-efficient, and can be used for any text embedding without training an embedding-specific inversion model. We measure the effectiveness of ZSInvert on several embeddings and demonstrate that it recovers key semantic information about the corresponding texts.
title Universal Zero-shot Embedding Inversion
topic Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00147