CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mireshghallah, Niloofar, Mangaokar, Neal, Kokhlikyan, Narine, Zharmagambetov, Arman, Zaheer, Manzil, Mahloujifar, Saeed, Chaudhuri, Kamalika
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912717298728960
author Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Mangaokar, Neal
Kokhlikyan, Narine
Zharmagambetov, Arman
Zaheer, Manzil
Mahloujifar, Saeed
Chaudhuri, Kamalika
author_facet Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Mangaokar, Neal
Kokhlikyan, Narine
Zharmagambetov, Arman
Zaheer, Manzil
Mahloujifar, Saeed
Chaudhuri, Kamalika
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly use persistent memory from past interactions to enhance personalization and task performance. However, this memory introduces critical risks when sensitive information is revealed in inappropriate contexts. We present CIMemories, a benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs appropriately control information flow from memory based on task context. CIMemories uses synthetic user profiles with over 100 attributes per user, paired with diverse task contexts in which each attribute may be essential for some tasks but inappropriate for others. Our evaluation reveals that frontier models exhibit up to 69% attribute-level violations (leaking information inappropriately), with lower violation rates often coming at the cost of task utility. Violations accumulate across both tasks and runs: as usage increases from 1 to 40 tasks, GPT-5's violations rise from 0.1% to 9.6%, reaching 25.1% when the same prompt is executed 5 times, revealing arbitrary and unstable behavior in which models leak different attributes for identical prompts. Privacy-conscious prompting does not solve this - models overgeneralize, sharing everything or nothing rather than making nuanced, context-dependent decisions. These findings reveal fundamental limitations that require contextually aware reasoning capabilities, not just better prompting or scaling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_14937
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMs
Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Mangaokar, Neal
Kokhlikyan, Narine
Zharmagambetov, Arman
Zaheer, Manzil
Mahloujifar, Saeed
Chaudhuri, Kamalika
Cryptography and Security
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly use persistent memory from past interactions to enhance personalization and task performance. However, this memory introduces critical risks when sensitive information is revealed in inappropriate contexts. We present CIMemories, a benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs appropriately control information flow from memory based on task context. CIMemories uses synthetic user profiles with over 100 attributes per user, paired with diverse task contexts in which each attribute may be essential for some tasks but inappropriate for others. Our evaluation reveals that frontier models exhibit up to 69% attribute-level violations (leaking information inappropriately), with lower violation rates often coming at the cost of task utility. Violations accumulate across both tasks and runs: as usage increases from 1 to 40 tasks, GPT-5's violations rise from 0.1% to 9.6%, reaching 25.1% when the same prompt is executed 5 times, revealing arbitrary and unstable behavior in which models leak different attributes for identical prompts. Privacy-conscious prompting does not solve this - models overgeneralize, sharing everything or nothing rather than making nuanced, context-dependent decisions. These findings reveal fundamental limitations that require contextually aware reasoning capabilities, not just better prompting or scaling.
title CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMs
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14937