Shengxiang Lin
Author directory2026
PGPO: Prototype-Guided Progressive Obfuscation for Privacy-Preserving LLM-Enhanced Recommendation
Shengxiang Lin | Jiajie Su | Pengyang Zhou | Xiang Chen | Xiaolin Zheng | Feng Tian | Chaochao Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shengxiang Lin | Jiajie Su | Pengyang Zhou | Xiang Chen | Xiaolin Zheng | Feng Tian | Chaochao Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLM-enhanced recommender systems encode item side information into semantic embeddings, but these embeddings may leak sensitive textual attributes through inversion attacks. Existing input-side defenses rely on trusted collection or local token perturbation, often disrupting the inter-item semantic topology needed for recommendation. To address it, we introduce relational fidelity as the key objective, requiring semantic shift for privacy while preserving relative item relations for utility. Based on this principle, we propose prototype-guided progressive obfuscation (PGPO), which learns topology-aware obfuscation anchors for high-influence prototype words and propagates them through a static semantic graph. PGPO is optimized with GRPO using individual dissimilarity, structural consistency, and semantic constraint rewards. Experiments on two benchmarks show strong inversion defense with near-upper-bound recommendation performance. The code is available at https://github.com/Shengxiang-Lin/PGPO.