Papers by James Flemings
Estimating Privacy Leakage of Augmented Contextual Knowledge in Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that privacy leakage of parametric knowledge often occurs from memorized pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric that builds on differential privacy to estimate the privacy leakage of contextual knowledge during decoding by comparing parametric and contextual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overestimates the privacy leakage of parametric knowledge while separating parametric and contextual knowledge. |
Differentially Private Next-Token Prediction of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important for ensuring privacy, but DP-SGD overestimates an adversary’s capabilities in having white box access. |
| Approach: | They propose a private prediction protocol for next-token prediction that utilizes the inherent stochasticity of next-toning and a public model to achieve Differential Privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol outperforms DP-SGD and DP training methods for privacy on large datasets. |
Differentially Private Knowledge Distillation via Synthetic Text Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language models (LLMs) are achieving state-of-the-art performance in many downstream tasks, but data privacy is a major challenge for practitioners. |
| Approach: | They propose a differentially private knowledge distillation algorithm that exploits the knowledge of a teacher LLM and a student's output distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm significantly improves the utility over baselines on the Big Patent dataset, with strong privacy parameters, =2. |
TokenSmith: Streamlining Data Editing, Search, and Inspection for Large-Scale Language Model Training and Interpretability (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Mohammad Aflah Khan, Ameya Godbole, Johnny Wei, Ryan Yixiang Wang, James Flemings, Krishna P. Gummadi, Willie Neiswanger, Robin Jia
| Challenge: | Existing workflows for pretraining large language models are cumbersome, fragmented and inaccessible. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source library for editing, inspection, and analysis of large language model datasets. |
| Outcome: | TokenSmith is an open-source library for editing, inspection, and analysis of large language model datasets. |