GraphProfiler: Source-Linked Sensitive Attribute Inference via Personal Knowledge Graphs

Ahmed Sohair Khan, Estrid He, Chenglong Ma, Monica Wachowicz, Elham Naghizade


Abstract
Sensitive attributes such as age, income, and occupation can be inferred from user-generated content by aggregating indirect cues across many ordinary posts. LLM-based profilers can perform this aggregation automatically and with high accuracy, which makes large-scale personal attribute inference a major privacy threat. Existing LLM-based profilers, however, offer limited insight into which specific posts, concepts, and relationships made an inference possible, which is key to targeted privacy mitigation, i.e., redacting or rewriting only the few posts that actually leak an attribute, rather than perturbing entire histories. We introduce GraphProfiler, an auditable LLM-based profiler that represents each user’s post history as a source-linked personal knowledge graph where nodes and edges trace back to the originating post and resolves attribute predictions to cited graph records and source texts. GraphProfiler reaches 86.7% attack success rate on the eight-attribute SynthPAI benchmark, within two points of strong text-only baselines, and 84.6% on PANDORA, while citing supporting evidence for over 98% of predictions. Our controlled ablation experiments provide evidence that the cited posts contribute to attack success, as removing them reduces the attack success rate substantially more than removing an equal number of random posts.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2136
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
48544–48574
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2136/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahmed Sohair Khan, Estrid He, Chenglong Ma, Monica Wachowicz, and Elham Naghizade. 2026. GraphProfiler: Source-Linked Sensitive Attribute Inference via Personal Knowledge Graphs. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 48544–48574, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GraphProfiler: Source-Linked Sensitive Attribute Inference via Personal Knowledge Graphs (Khan et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2136.pdf