{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/large-language-models-are-advanced","title":"Large Language Models are Advanced Anonymizers","arxiv_id":"2402.13846","date":"2024-02-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Robin Staab","Mark Vero","Mislav Balunović","Martin Vechev"],"abstract":"Recent privacy research on large language models (LLMs) has shown that they achieve near-human-level performance at inferring personal data from online texts. With ever-increasing model capabilities, existing text anonymization methods are currently lacking behind regulatory requirements and adversarial threats. In this work, we take two steps to bridge this gap: First, we present a new setting for evaluating anonymization in the face of adversarial LLM inferences, allowing for a natural measurement of anonymization performance while remedying some of the shortcomings of previous metrics. Then, within this setting, we develop a novel LLM-based adversarial anonymization framework leveraging the strong inferential capabilities of LLMs to inform our anonymization procedure. We conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of adversarial anonymization across 13 LLMs on real-world and synthetic online texts, comparing it against multiple baselines and industry-grade anonymizers. Our evaluation shows that adversarial anonymization outperforms current commercial anonymizers both in terms of the resulting utility and privacy. We support our findings with a human study (n=50) highlighting a strong and consistent human preference for LLM-anonymized texts.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13846v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.13846v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"large-language-models-are-advanced","repo_url":"https://github.com/eth-sri/llm-anonymization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"text-anonymization","task_name":"Text Anonymization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2402.13846","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}