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MemPrivacy: Privacy-Preserving Personalized Memory Management for Edge-Cloud Agents
Pith reviewed 2026-05-15 05:40 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
MemPrivacy uses edge-side privacy span detection and semantic placeholders to enable cloud memory management for LLM agents while limiting utility loss to 1.6% and outperforming masking baselines.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
MemPrivacy limits utility loss to within 1.6%, outperforming baseline masking strategies while achieving strong performance in privacy information extraction, substantially surpassing GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.1-Pro.
Load-bearing premise
That type-aware placeholders retain sufficient semantic information for effective memory formation, retrieval, and personalization even after sensitive spans are removed from cloud-side processing.
read the original abstract
As LLM-powered agents are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud environments, personalized memory has become a key enabler of long-term adaptation and user-centric interaction. However, cloud-assisted memory management exposes sensitive user information, while existing privacy protection methods typically rely on aggressive masking that removes task-relevant semantics and consequently degrades memory utility and personalization quality. To address this challenge, We propose MemPrivacy, which identifies privacy-sensitive spans on edge devices, replaces them with semantically structured type-aware placeholders for cloud-side memory processing, and restores the original values locally when needed. By decoupling privacy protection from semantic destruction, MemPrivacy minimizes sensitive data exposure while retaining the information required for effective memory formation and retrieval. We also construct MemPrivacy-Bench for systematic evaluation, a dataset covering 200 users and over 155k privacy instances, and introduce a four-level privacy taxonomy for configurable protection policies. Experiments show that MemPrivacy achieves strong performance in privacy information extraction, substantially surpassing strong general-purpose models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.1-Pro, while also reducing inference latency. Across multiple widely used memory systems, MemPrivacy limits utility loss to within 1.6%, outperforming baseline masking strategies. Overall, MemPrivacy offers an effective balance between privacy protection and personalized memory utility for edge-cloud agents, enabling secure, practical, and user-transparent deployment.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
axioms (2)
- domain assumption Privacy-sensitive spans can be reliably identified on edge devices using local models without access to full cloud context.
- domain assumption Type-aware placeholders retain sufficient semantic type information for downstream memory formation and retrieval.
invented entities (1)
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type-aware placeholders
no independent evidence
discussion (0)
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