Qian Ma
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Qian Ma
2026
Private Seeds, Public LLMs: Realistic and Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data Generation
Qian Ma | Sarah Rajtmajer
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Qian Ma | Sarah Rajtmajer
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for synthetic data generation. A particularly important use case is producing synthetic replicas of private text, which requires carefully balancing privacy and utility. We propose Realistic and Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data Generation (RPSG), which uses private seeds and integrates privacy-preserving strategies, including a formal differential privacy (DP) mechanism in the candidate selection, to generate realistic synthetic data. Comprehensive experiments against state-of-the-art private synthetic data generation methods demonstrate that RPSG achieves high fidelity to private data while providing strong privacy protection.
Aggregation-Aware Synthetic Text Generation Against Authorship Re-Identification
Qian Ma | Anna Cinzia Squicciarini | Sarah Rajtmajer
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Qian Ma | Anna Cinzia Squicciarini | Sarah Rajtmajer
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Online users often release multiple texts under the same identity, giving attackers an author profile that can reveal more than any single text. Existing authorship obfuscation methods optimize privacy independently for each document, leaving them blind to cross-document correlations that make aggregation dangerous. We propose Aggregation-Aware Synthetic Text Generation (AAST), a framework that addresses this gap by jointly selecting synthetic texts at the bundle level rather than optimizing each text in isolation. AAST targets attribution and verification attacks, including cross-genre settings where attacker references come from a genre not observed during generation or selection. Experiments across same-genre, cross-genre, neural, and independent non-neural stylometric attacks show that AAST lowers account-level linkability as bundle size grows, while preserving semantic quality, linguistic acceptability, and sentiment alignment.