Shuo Huang
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2026
Conformal Privacy Auditing: Calibrated Re-identification Attacks with Statistical Guarantees
Shuo Huang | Gholamreza Haffari | Xingliang Yuan | Lizhen Qu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shuo Huang | Gholamreza Haffari | Xingliang Yuan | Lizhen Qu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Empirical identity leakage from released text is increasingly driven by attackers that combine large language models (LLMs) with auxiliary knowledge to link documents to individuals. Existing audits typically report success rates for specific attack pipelines but lack finite-sample statistical guarantees, while training-time protections such as differential privacy are difficult to translate into release-time decisions for individual natural-language documents. We introduce Conformal Privacy Auditing (CPA), a distribution-free calibration framework that provides a statistical certificate of re-identification risk for each released document against LLM-empowered adversaries. CPA outputs a conformal ambiguity set of candidate identities that is guaranteed to contain the true identity with user-chosen confidence under exchangeability, together with an interpretable leakage proxy derived from set size. CPA supports both logit-access and sampling-only attackers, enabling audits of open-source models and proprietary API models in a unified framework. Across multiple release benchmarks and attacker configurations, CPA achieves calibrated coverage and reveals sharp shifts in certified identifiability as auxiliary knowledge, LLM augmentation, and release mechanisms vary, providing a statistically grounded basis for reporting and comparing release-time linkage risk across attacker configurations, datasets, and release mechanisms alike.
2025
Zero-Shot Privacy-Aware Text Rewriting via Iterative Tree Search
Shuo Huang | Xingliang Yuan | Gholamreza Haffari | Lizhen Qu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Shuo Huang | Xingliang Yuan | Gholamreza Haffari | Lizhen Qu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
The increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in cloud-based services has raised significant privacy concerns, as user inputs may inadvertently expose sensitive information. Existing text anonymization and de-identification techniques, such as rule-based redaction and scrubbing, often struggle to balance privacy preservation with text naturalness and utility. In this work, we propose a zero-shot, tree-search-based iterative sentence rewriting algorithm that systematically obfuscates or deletes private information while preserving coherence, relevance, and naturalness. Our method incrementally rewrites privacy-sensitive segments through a structured search guided by a reward model, enabling dynamic exploration of the rewriting space. Experiments on privacy-sensitive datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving a superior balance between privacy protection and utility preservation.
NAP2: A Benchmark for Naturalness and Privacy-Preserving Text Rewriting by Learning from Human
Shuo Huang | William Maclean | Xiaoxi Kang | Qiongkai Xu | Zhuang Li | Xingliang Yuan | Gholamreza Haffari | Lizhen Qu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Shuo Huang | William Maclean | Xiaoxi Kang | Qiongkai Xu | Zhuang Li | Xingliang Yuan | Gholamreza Haffari | Lizhen Qu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
The widespread use of cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns over user privacy, as sensitive information may be inadvertently exposed during interactions with these services. To protect privacy before sending sensitive data to those models, we suggest sanitizing sensitive text using two common strategies used by humans: i) deleting sensitive expressions, and ii) obscuring sensitive details by abstracting them. To explore the issues and develop a tool for text rewriting, we curate the first corpus, coined , through both crowdsourcing and the use of large language models (LLMs). Compared to the prior works based on differential privacy, which lead to a sharp drop in information utility and unnatural texts, the human-inspired approaches result in more natural rewrites and offer an improved balance between privacy protection and data utility, as demonstrated by our extensive experiments.
2024
Causal Discovery Inspired Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction
Yuncheng Hua | Yujin Huang | Shuo Huang | Tao Feng | Lizhen Qu | Christopher Bain | Richard Bassed | Reza Haf
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Yuncheng Hua | Yujin Huang | Shuo Huang | Tao Feng | Lizhen Qu | Christopher Bain | Richard Bassed | Reza Haf
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
This paper tackles the task of emotion-cause pair extraction in the unsupervised domain adaptation setting.The problem is challenging as the distributions of the events causing emotions in target domains are dramatically different than those in source domains, despite the distributions of emotional expressions between domains are overlapped. Inspired by causal discovery,we propose a novel deep latent model in the variational autoencoder (VAE) framework, which not only captures the underlying latent structures of data but also utilizes the easily transferable knowledge of emotions as the bridge to link the distributions of events in different domains. To facilitate knowledge transfer across domains, we also propose a novel variational posterior regularization technique to disentangle the latent representations of emotions from those of events in order to mitigate the damage caused by the spurious correlations related to the events in source domains. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our model outperforms the strongest baseline by approximately 11.05% on a Chinese benchmark and 2.45% on a English benchmark in terms of weighted-average F1 score. We have released our source code and the generated dataset publicly at: https://github.com/tk1363704/CAREL-VAE.