Assessing Privacy Risks in Language Models: A Case Study on Summarization Tasks

Ruixiang Tang, Gord Lueck, Rodolfo Quispe, Huseyin Inan, Janardhan Kulkarni, Xia Hu


Abstract
Large language models have revolutionized the field of NLP by achieving state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. However, there is a concern that these models may disclose information in the training data. In this study, we focus on the summarization task and investigate the membership inference (MI) attack: given a sample and black-box access to a model’s API, it is possible to determine if the sample was part of the training data. We exploit text similarity and the model’s resistance to document modifications as potential MI signals and evaluate their effectiveness on widely used datasets. Our results demonstrate that summarization models are at risk of exposing data membership, even in cases where the reference summary is not available. Furthermore, we discuss several safeguards for training summarization models to protect against MI attacks and discuss the inherent trade-off between privacy and utility.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.1029
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15406–15418
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1029
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.1029
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruixiang Tang, Gord Lueck, Rodolfo Quispe, Huseyin Inan, Janardhan Kulkarni, and Xia Hu. 2023. Assessing Privacy Risks in Language Models: A Case Study on Summarization Tasks. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15406–15418, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing Privacy Risks in Language Models: A Case Study on Summarization Tasks (Tang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1029.pdf