LLM生成摘要时导出的向量可能泄露敏感信息,需针对性防护。
Vectors Are Not Neutral: Sensitive-Information Inference from Exported LLM Representations in Summarization

- 检测临床摘要中两种导出向量的敏感信息可恢复性
- 一种向量隐私保护后,另一种仍可被攻破
- 提出针对导出向量的高效防护方法,适合医疗AI安全研究者
大型语言模型(LLM)在生成临床出院摘要时,可能将私密输入的紧凑向量表示传递给下游检索、监控或分析流程。即使原始病历受限访问,导出的向量因权限不同仍可能支持敏感信息推断,带来残留的信息泄露风险。本文以电子健康记录(EHR)中的种族信息为可控敏感标签,研究系统可能保留或暴露的两类产物:最终提示词隐藏状态与均值池化后的提示表示。结果表明,降低某一导出产物对敏感标签的可恢复性,并不意味着另一产物也得到同等保护。作为缓解案例,本文提出SurfaceLoRA——一种针对导出向量的参数高效微调方法,通过在指定导出向量上附加梯度反转判别器实现隐私保护。在五分类均衡探测协议下,SurfaceLoRA使目标最终标记向量的种族可恢复性降至随机水平,同时保持摘要生成性能;然而未靶向的池化向量仍存在显著可恢复性。这表明隐私审计与防护必须针对实际留存或暴露的向量产物进行。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language model (LLM) summarization systems may pass compact vector representations of private inputs to downstream retrieval, monitoring, audit, or analytic workflows. Even when source documents remain access-restricted, derived vectors may be handled under different access controls and still support sensitive-information inference, creating a residual information-disclosure risk. We study this issue in clinical discharge-summary generation as a high-stakes case study, using electronic health record (EHR)-recorded race as a controlled sensitive-label audit. We audit two artifacts that a system might retain or expose to downstream components: the final prompt-token hidden state and the mean-pooled prompt representation. Our results show that reducing recoverability of the case-study sensitive label from one exported artifact does not necessarily reduce recoverability from another. As a mitigation case study, we introduce SurfaceLoRA, an exported-vector-targeted parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that uses a gradient-reversal discriminator attached to a designated exported vector. Under a balanced five-way probing protocol, SurfaceLoRA reduces EHR-recorded race recoverability from the targeted final-token artifact toward chance while preserving summarization utility, yet recoverability remains substantially higher from untargeted pooled artifacts. These findings show that privacy auditing and mitigation should be performed on the exact vector artifact retained or exposed to downstream components.
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