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. |
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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. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge unlearning to reduce privacy risks for LMs by performing gradient ascent on target token sequences instead of trying to unlearn all the data at once. |
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Preserving Privacy Through Dememorization: An Unlearning Technique For Mitigating Memorization Risks In Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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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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Learnable Privacy Neurons Localization in Language Models (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) memorize and disclose private information, especially Personally Identifiable Information (PII) concerns regarding privacy and security within human society remain poorly understood. |
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REVS: Unlearning Sensitive Information in Language Models via Rank Editing in the Vocabulary Space (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to address this issue involve costly dataset scrubbing or model filtering through unlearning and model editing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for unlearning sensitive information from language models . they curate email and URL datasets and a social security number dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows superior performance and robustness to extraction attacks on real-world datasets. |
Protecting Privacy Through Approximating Optimal Parameters for Sequence Unlearning in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities on tasks, but are vulnerable to extraction attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose Privacy Protection via Optimal Parameters (POP) which induces the model to forget about some of its training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in retaining LM performance on 9 classification and 4 dialogue benchmarks. |
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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach removes personal information from the spoken messages using an automatic named entity recognition method. |
Training Text-to-Text Transformers with Privacy Guarantees (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in NLP often stem from large transformer-based pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose differentially private (DP) training as a potential mitigation for models that can memorize parts of training data. |
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Neural Text Sanitization with Explicit Measures of Privacy Risk (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Personal data, also known as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), often abound in text documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for text sanitization that uses a neural entity recognizer to detect and classify potential personal identifiers and a classifier trained on labelled data to determine which entities to mask . |
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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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework protects inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
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. |
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