Reconstruction of Personally Identifiable Information from Supervised Finetuned Models

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Autori principali: Furukawa, Sae, Oprea, Alina
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Furukawa, Sae
Oprea, Alina
author_facet Furukawa, Sae
Oprea, Alina
contents Supervised Finetuning (SFT) has become one of the primary methods for adapting a large language model (LLM) with extensive pre-trained knowledge to domain-specific, instruction-following tasks. SFT datasets, composed of instruction-response pairs, often include user-provided information that may contain sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), raising privacy concerns. This paper studies the problem of PII reconstruction from SFT models for the first time. We construct multi-turn, user-centric Q&A datasets in sensitive domains, specifically medical and legal settings, that incorporate PII to enable realistic evaluation of leakage. Using these datasets, we evaluate the extent to which an adversary, with varying levels of knowledge about the fine-tuning dataset, can infer sensitive information about individuals whose data was used during SFT. In the reconstruction setting, we propose COVA, a novel decoding algorithm to reconstruct PII under prefix-based attacks, consistently outperforming existing extraction methods. Our results show that even partial attacker knowledge can significantly improve reconstruction success, while leakage varies substantially across PII types.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12264
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reconstruction of Personally Identifiable Information from Supervised Finetuned Models
Furukawa, Sae
Oprea, Alina
Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Supervised Finetuning (SFT) has become one of the primary methods for adapting a large language model (LLM) with extensive pre-trained knowledge to domain-specific, instruction-following tasks. SFT datasets, composed of instruction-response pairs, often include user-provided information that may contain sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), raising privacy concerns. This paper studies the problem of PII reconstruction from SFT models for the first time. We construct multi-turn, user-centric Q&A datasets in sensitive domains, specifically medical and legal settings, that incorporate PII to enable realistic evaluation of leakage. Using these datasets, we evaluate the extent to which an adversary, with varying levels of knowledge about the fine-tuning dataset, can infer sensitive information about individuals whose data was used during SFT. In the reconstruction setting, we propose COVA, a novel decoding algorithm to reconstruct PII under prefix-based attacks, consistently outperforming existing extraction methods. Our results show that even partial attacker knowledge can significantly improve reconstruction success, while leakage varies substantially across PII types.
title Reconstruction of Personally Identifiable Information from Supervised Finetuned Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12264