| Challenge: | Existing methods to train language models without memorizing sensitive data are mismatched and can be difficult to screen and filter. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train language generation models while protecting the confidential segments of training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method prevents unintended memorization by randomizing parts of the training process while protecting strong confidentiality. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data, including sensitive information that poses a risk to personal privacy if exposed. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel unlearning approach that utilizes an efficient reinforcement learning feedback loop via proximal policy optimization to incentivize the LLMs to learn a paraphrasing policy to unlearn the pre-training data. |
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Learning and Evaluating a Differentially Private Pre-trained Language Model (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Shlomo Hoory, Amir Feder, Avichai Tendler, Sofia Erell, Alon Peled-Cohen, Itay Laish, Hootan Nakhost, Uri Stemmer, Ayelet Benjamini, Avinatan Hassidim, Yossi Matias
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Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that an adversary can extract training data from Pretrained Language Models including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as names, phone numbers, and email addresses. |
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Selective Differential Privacy for Language Modeling (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to protect sensitive data from leaking are over-pessimistic and undifferentiated. |
| Approach: | They propose a new privacy notion, selective differential privacy, to provide rigorous privacy guarantees on the sensitive portion of the data to improve model utility. |
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Adapting Language Models When Training on Privacy-Transformed Data (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Using data sanitization methods to remove personal information from spoken messages is not effective because privacy-transformed data is unlikely to match the test distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a data sanitization approach to remove personal information from spoken messages by replacing named entities with other words from the same class. |
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TextObfuscator: Making Pre-trained Language Model a Privacy Protector via Obfuscating Word Representations (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference services are plagued by privacy concerns, such as sharing sensitive data with service providers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for protecting inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
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Unintended Memorization of Sensitive Information in Fine-Tuned Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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Marton Szep, Jorge Marin Ruiz, Georgios Kaissis, Paulina Seidl, Rüdiger von Eisenhart-Rothe, Florian Hinterwimmer, Daniel Rueckert
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) on sensitive datasets carry a substantial risk of unintended memorization and leakage of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) prior studies have analyzed memorizing dynamics in LLMs during pre-training and fine-tuning. |
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DEPN: Detecting and Editing Privacy Neurons in Pretrained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that pretrained language models memorize and regurgitate a significant portion of training data, including atypical data points that appear only once in the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to locate and erase risky neurons in order to eliminate the impact of privacy data in the model in batches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates the impact of privacy data in the model in batches without affecting the model's performance. |
Private Memorization Editing: Turning Memorization into a Defense to Strengthen Data Privacy in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) memorize and therefore, among huge amounts of uncontrolled data, may memorize Personally Identifiable Information (PII). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a model knowledge to memorize PII from training data to mitigate the memorization of PI I. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the number of leaked PIIs in a number of configurations while making it more robust against privacy Training Data Extraction attacks. |
Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yijia Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Yushi Bai, Yue Wu, Xianjun Yang, Xiao Luo, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Quanquan Gu, Haifeng Chen, Wei Wang, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic comprehension and generation capability, but when applied to specialized industries, they face challenges such as hallucination, insufficient domain knowledge, and failing to incorporate the latest domain knowledge. |
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| Outcome: | The proposed model protects private data while enhancing the model's knowledge. |