Papers for

enterprise it security teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Dynamic privacy protection boosts usefulness of large language models

Demystifying the Privacy-Utility Trade-off in LLM Interactions

Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models into daily tasks relies on context-rich instructions, inevitably exposing sensitive user information. Current privacy-preserving methods typically employ context-agnostic static rules, causing severe utility degradation. However, the specific mechanisms governing how sanitization impacts downstream performance remain largely underexplored. To address this, we conduct a systematic analysis to deconstruct the privacy-utility trade-off, uncovering three underlying mechanisms: (1) Context-Dependent Utility, which first establishes when to sanitize by revealing that data value shifts from critical constraints to dispensable noise based on user intent; (2) Strategic Adaptation, which subsequently determines how to sanitize by dictating that the choice between removal and replacement depends on the task's reliance on factual integrity versus structural coherence; and (3) Combinatorial Interplay, which finally extends the protection scope by demonstrating that attributes form a semantic web of synergistic dependencies or antagonistic redundancies. Guided by these insights, we introduce an intent-driven local protection framework. By distilling a lightweight model Veilmind-4B to drive a dynamic extraction-sanitization-restoration pipeline, our approach reaches a low-leakage privacy point while preserving substantially higher response utility than existing privacy-oriented baselines, advancing the privacy-utility trade-off toward the Pareto frontier.

Thu 10 SeptArtificial IntelligenceCryptography and Security
The gist
Large language models help with many tasks but need a lot of personal information to work well, which risks privacy. The authors found that privacy methods that treat all data the same harm usefulness a lot. They discovered that what to hide, how to hide it, and how information fits together depends on the user's goal and the task. Using this, they built a system that smartly protects privacy while keeping the model's helpfulness much higher than before.
Open 2609.10992v1