arXiv:2602.15897cs.CL2026-02被引 2

通过混淆令牌破解梯度反演攻击,保护大模型训练隐私。

Mitigating Gradient Inversion Risks in Language Models via Token Obfuscation

  • 用语义不同但嵌入相近的替代词替换原词,切断梯度与原始文本的关联。
  • 在多种模型和任务中,数据恢复率低至1%,性能损失极小。
  • 适合需保护训练数据隐私的AI协作场景,如联邦学习、开源模型微调。

大规模语言模型的协同训练易受梯度反演攻击(GIA)威胁,攻击者可从共享梯度还原私有训练数据。现有防御多依赖梯度加噪或剪枝,但因梯度、嵌入与词元空间间语义相似性仍存,防护效果有限。本文提出GHOST(梯度屏蔽带混淆词),一种基于词元级混淆的新型防御机制。其核心思想是:由于词元空间规模巨大,存在语义不同却嵌入相近的替代词,可作为原词的‘影子’,在词元空间实现语义断连,同时保留嵌入与梯度空间的连接。GHOST包含搜索与选择两步:搜索阶段通过多准则筛选语义差异大的候选词;选择阶段优选最优影子词,以最小化对训练关键特征的干扰。实验覆盖BERT至Llama等多种架构与数据集,结果表明,GHOST在分类与生成任务中均有效抵御先进GIA及自适应攻击,数据恢复率最低达1%,分类F1最高0.92,困惑度仅下降5.45,显著兼顾隐私保护与模型性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Training and fine-tuning large-scale language models largely benefit from collaborative learning, but the approach has been proven vulnerable to gradient inversion attacks (GIAs), which allow adversaries to reconstruct private training data from shared gradients. Existing defenses mainly employ gradient perturbation techniques, e.g., noise injection or gradient pruning, to disrupt GIAs' direct mapping from gradient space to token space. However, these methods often fall short due to the retention of semantics similarity across gradient, embedding, and token spaces. In this work, we propose a novel defense mechanism named GHOST (gradient shield with obfuscated tokens), a token-level obfuscation mechanism that neutralizes GIAs by decoupling the inherent connections across gradient, embedding, and token spaces. GHOST is built upon an important insight: due to the large scale of the token space, there exist semantically distinct yet embedding-proximate tokens that can serve as the shadow substitutes of the original tokens, which enables a semantic disconnection in the token space while preserving the connection in the embedding and gradient spaces. GHOST comprises a searching step, which identifies semantically distinct candidate tokens using a multi-criteria searching process, and a selection step, which selects optimal shadow tokens to ensure minimal disruption to features critical for training by preserving alignment with the internal outputs produced by original tokens. Evaluation across diverse model architectures (from BERT to Llama) and datasets demonstrates the remarkable effectiveness of GHOST in protecting privacy (as low as 1% in recovery rate) and preserving utility (up to 0.92 in classification F1 and 5.45 in perplexity), in both classification and generation tasks against state-of-the-art GIAs and adaptive attack scenarios.

隐私保护梯度攻击语言模型对抗防御

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。