RecPS: Privacy Risk Scoring for Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: He, Jiajie, Gu, Yuechun, Chen, Keke
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author He, Jiajie
Gu, Yuechun
Chen, Keke
author_facet He, Jiajie
Gu, Yuechun
Chen, Keke
contents Recommender systems (RecSys) have become an essential component of many web applications. The core of the system is a recommendation model trained on highly sensitive user-item interaction data. While privacy-enhancing techniques are actively studied in the research community, the real-world model development still depends on minimal privacy protection, e.g., via controlled access. Users of such systems should have the right to choose \emph{not} to share highly sensitive interactions. However, there is no method allowing the user to know which interactions are more sensitive than others. Thus, quantifying the privacy risk of RecSys training data is a critical step to enabling privacy-aware RecSys model development and deployment. We propose a membership-inference attack (MIA)- based privacy scoring method, RecPS, to measure privacy risks at both the interaction and user levels. The RecPS interaction-level score definition is motivated and derived from differential privacy, which is then extended to the user-level scoring method. A critical component is the interaction-level MIA method RecLiRA, which gives high-quality membership estimation. We have conducted extensive experiments on well-known benchmark datasets and RecSys models to show the unique features and benefits of RecPS scoring in risk assessment and RecSys model unlearning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_18365
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RecPS: Privacy Risk Scoring for Recommender Systems
He, Jiajie
Gu, Yuechun
Chen, Keke
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Recommender systems (RecSys) have become an essential component of many web applications. The core of the system is a recommendation model trained on highly sensitive user-item interaction data. While privacy-enhancing techniques are actively studied in the research community, the real-world model development still depends on minimal privacy protection, e.g., via controlled access. Users of such systems should have the right to choose \emph{not} to share highly sensitive interactions. However, there is no method allowing the user to know which interactions are more sensitive than others. Thus, quantifying the privacy risk of RecSys training data is a critical step to enabling privacy-aware RecSys model development and deployment. We propose a membership-inference attack (MIA)- based privacy scoring method, RecPS, to measure privacy risks at both the interaction and user levels. The RecPS interaction-level score definition is motivated and derived from differential privacy, which is then extended to the user-level scoring method. A critical component is the interaction-level MIA method RecLiRA, which gives high-quality membership estimation. We have conducted extensive experiments on well-known benchmark datasets and RecSys models to show the unique features and benefits of RecPS scoring in risk assessment and RecSys model unlearning.
title RecPS: Privacy Risk Scoring for Recommender Systems
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18365