Retrieval-Confused Generation is a Good Defender for Privacy Violation Attack of Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Peng, Wanli, Chen, Xin, Fu, Hang, He, XinYu, Yiming, Xue, Wen, Juan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866909659722416128
author Peng, Wanli
Chen, Xin
Fu, Hang
He, XinYu
Yiming, Xue
Wen, Juan
author_facet Peng, Wanli
Chen, Xin
Fu, Hang
He, XinYu
Yiming, Xue
Wen, Juan
contents Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made a profound impact on our society and also raised new security concerns. Particularly, due to the remarkable inference ability of LLMs, the privacy violation attack (PVA), revealed by Staab et al., introduces serious personal privacy issues. Existing defense methods mainly leverage LLMs to anonymize the input query, which requires costly inference time and cannot gain satisfactory defense performance. Moreover, directly rejecting the PVA query seems like an effective defense method, while the defense method is exposed, promoting the evolution of PVA. In this paper, we propose a novel defense paradigm based on retrieval-confused generation (RCG) of LLMs, which can efficiently and covertly defend the PVA. We first design a paraphrasing prompt to induce the LLM to rewrite the "user comments" of the attack query to construct a disturbed database. Then, we propose the most irrelevant retrieval strategy to retrieve the desired user data from the disturbed database. Finally, the "data comments" are replaced with the retrieved user data to form a defended query, leading to responding to the adversary with some wrong personal attributes, i.e., the attack fails. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets and eight popular LLMs to comprehensively evaluate the feasibility and the superiority of the proposed defense method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19889
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Retrieval-Confused Generation is a Good Defender for Privacy Violation Attack of Large Language Models
Peng, Wanli
Chen, Xin
Fu, Hang
He, XinYu
Yiming, Xue
Wen, Juan
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made a profound impact on our society and also raised new security concerns. Particularly, due to the remarkable inference ability of LLMs, the privacy violation attack (PVA), revealed by Staab et al., introduces serious personal privacy issues. Existing defense methods mainly leverage LLMs to anonymize the input query, which requires costly inference time and cannot gain satisfactory defense performance. Moreover, directly rejecting the PVA query seems like an effective defense method, while the defense method is exposed, promoting the evolution of PVA. In this paper, we propose a novel defense paradigm based on retrieval-confused generation (RCG) of LLMs, which can efficiently and covertly defend the PVA. We first design a paraphrasing prompt to induce the LLM to rewrite the "user comments" of the attack query to construct a disturbed database. Then, we propose the most irrelevant retrieval strategy to retrieve the desired user data from the disturbed database. Finally, the "data comments" are replaced with the retrieved user data to form a defended query, leading to responding to the adversary with some wrong personal attributes, i.e., the attack fails. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets and eight popular LLMs to comprehensively evaluate the feasibility and the superiority of the proposed defense method.
title Retrieval-Confused Generation is a Good Defender for Privacy Violation Attack of Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19889