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Main Authors: Charpentier, Lucas Georges Gabriel, Lison, Pierre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09184
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author Charpentier, Lucas Georges Gabriel
Lison, Pierre
author_facet Charpentier, Lucas Georges Gabriel
Lison, Pierre
contents Text de-identification techniques are often used to mask personally identifiable information (PII) from documents. Their ability to conceal the identity of the individuals mentioned in a text is, however, hard to measure. Recent work has shown how the robustness of de-identification methods could be assessed by attempting the reverse process of _re-identification_, based on an automated adversary using its background knowledge to uncover the PIIs that have been masked. This paper presents two complementary strategies to build stronger re-identification attacks. We first show that (1) the _order_ in which the PII spans are re-identified matters, and that aggregating predictions across multiple orderings leads to improved results. We also find that (2) reasoning models can boost the re-identification performance, especially when the adversary is assumed to have access to extensive background knowledge.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_09184
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stronger Re-identification Attacks through Reasoning and Aggregation
Charpentier, Lucas Georges Gabriel
Lison, Pierre
Computation and Language
Text de-identification techniques are often used to mask personally identifiable information (PII) from documents. Their ability to conceal the identity of the individuals mentioned in a text is, however, hard to measure. Recent work has shown how the robustness of de-identification methods could be assessed by attempting the reverse process of _re-identification_, based on an automated adversary using its background knowledge to uncover the PIIs that have been masked. This paper presents two complementary strategies to build stronger re-identification attacks. We first show that (1) the _order_ in which the PII spans are re-identified matters, and that aggregating predictions across multiple orderings leads to improved results. We also find that (2) reasoning models can boost the re-identification performance, especially when the adversary is assumed to have access to extensive background knowledge.
title Stronger Re-identification Attacks through Reasoning and Aggregation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09184