arXiv:2511.07772cs.CRcs.AI2025-11被引 12

通过注入定向向量,防止大模型推理时泄露隐私信息。

SALT: Steering Activations towards Leakage-free Thinking in Chain of Thought

  • 在推理过程中注入特定向量,干预高泄露层的隐藏状态。
  • 在AirGapAgent-R数据集上,最高降低31.2%的上下文隐私泄露率。
  • 轻量级测试阶段干预,不牺牲模型任务性能,适合部署应用。

随着大型语言模型(LLMs)作为能访问敏感用户数据的个人助手不断演进,其面临一个关键的隐私挑战:尽管已有研究关注输出层面的隐私保护,但近期发现,这些模型常在其内部推理过程中泄露私密信息,违背了上下文隐私预期。这种‘漏泄性思考’表现为模型在最终输出看似安全的情况下,仍会无意中暴露敏感细节。如何在不损害推理能力的前提下防止此类泄露,成为亟待解决的问题。本文提出一种轻量级的测试阶段干预方法——SALT(Steering Activations towards Leakage-free Thinking),通过向隐藏状态注入目标引导向量,抑制推理过程中的隐私泄露。我们识别出导致高泄露的关键层。在多个LLM上的实验表明,SALT在QwQ-32B上实现18.2%的CPL降低,在Llama-3.1-8B上降低17.9%,在Deepseek上降低31.2%(基于AirGapAgent-R数据集),同时保持与原模型相当的任务表现和实用性。本工作为具备推理能力的语言模型提供了可落地的测试阶段隐私防护方案,推动更安全的LLM个人代理部署。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into personal assistants with access to sensitive user data, they face a critical privacy challenge: while prior work has addressed output-level privacy, recent findings reveal that LLMs often leak private information through their internal reasoning processes, violating contextual privacy expectations. These leaky thoughts occur when models inadvertently expose sensitive details in their reasoning traces, even when final outputs appear safe. The challenge lies in preventing such leakage without compromising the model's reasoning capabilities, requiring a delicate balance between privacy and utility. We introduce Steering Activations towards Leakage-free Thinking (SALT), a lightweight test-time intervention that mitigates privacy leakage in model's Chain of Thought (CoT) by injecting targeted steering vectors into hidden state. We identify the high-leakage layers responsible for this behavior. Through experiments across multiple LLMs, we demonstrate that SALT achieves reductions including $18.2\%$ reduction in CPL on QwQ-32B, $17.9\%$ reduction in CPL on Llama-3.1-8B, and $31.2\%$ reduction in CPL on Deepseek in contextual privacy leakage dataset AirGapAgent-R while maintaining comparable task performance and utility. Our work establishes SALT as a practical approach for test-time privacy protection in reasoning-capable language models, offering a path toward safer deployment of LLM-based personal agents.

隐私保护推理安全大模型轻量干预

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