实证检验大模型微调中的隐私风险,发现数据分布越接近预训练数据,隐私泄露越严重。
Benchmarking Empirical Privacy Protection for Adaptations of Large Language Models

- 通过对抗性攻击测试不同分布下微调模型的隐私泄露风险
- 相同理论隐私保护下,近似预训练分布的数据导致更高实际泄露风险
- 参数高效微调(如LoRA)在分布外数据中表现最佳,适合敏感场景
近期研究将差分隐私(DP)应用于大语言模型(LLM)微调以应对敏感任务,提供理论保障。然而其实际效果尚不明确,部分原因在于预训练阶段与微调数据存在重叠和依赖关系,可能削弱DP保护效果。为评估实际风险,我们采用先进攻击方法(如鲁棒成员推断、蜜罐数据提取),系统考察微调数据分布对隐私的影响:从与预训练数据完全重合,到同分布(IID),再到完全分布外(OOD)。同时评估不同微调方法和隐私设置下的脆弱性。结果表明,分布偏移显著影响隐私风险:在相同理论保障下,微调数据越接近预训练分布,实际隐私风险越高,即使无直接数据重叠。我们发现,参数高效微调方法(如LoRA)在分布外数据中实现最高实证隐私保护。该基准揭示了实现实用隐私的关键因素,为敏感场景部署定制模型提供可操作洞见。未来建议构建覆盖预训练-微调全链路的综合隐私评估框架。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent work has applied differential privacy (DP) to adapt large language models (LLMs) for sensitive applications, offering theoretical guarantees. However, its practical effectiveness remains unclear, partly due to LLM pretraining, where overlaps and interdependencies with adaptation data can undermine privacy despite DP efforts. To analyze this issue in practice, we investigate privacy risks under DP adaptations in LLMs using state-of-the-art attacks such as robust membership inference and canary data extraction. We benchmark these risks by systematically varying the adaptation data distribution, from exact overlaps with pretraining data, through in-distribution (IID) cases, to entirely out-of-distribution (OOD) examples. Additionally, we evaluate how different adaptation methods and different privacy regimes impact the vulnerability. Our results show that distribution shifts strongly influence privacy vulnerability: the closer the adaptation data is to the pretraining distribution, the higher the practical privacy risk at the same theoretical guarantee, even without direct data overlap. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as LoRA, achieve the highest empirical privacy protection for OOD data. Our benchmark identifies key factors for achieving practical privacy in DP LLM adaptation, providing actionable insights for deploying customized models in sensitive settings. Looking forward, we propose a structured framework for holistic privacy assessment beyond adaptation privacy, to identify and evaluate risks across the full pretrain-adapt pipeline of LLMs.
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