Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

DEPN: Detecting and Editing Privacy Neurons in Pretrained Language Models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2310.20138 v2 pith:OYQQ5DBQ submitted 2023-10-31 cs.CR cs.CL

classification cs.CRcs.CL
keywords privacyneuronsdatalanguagemodelmodelspretraineddepn
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Large language models pretrained on a huge amount of data capture rich knowledge and information in the training data. The ability of data memorization and regurgitation in pretrained language models, revealed in previous studies, brings the risk of data leakage. In order to effectively reduce these risks, we propose a framework DEPN to Detect and Edit Privacy Neurons in pretrained language models, partially inspired by knowledge neurons and model editing. In DEPN, we introduce a novel method, termed as privacy neuron detector, to locate neurons associated with private information, and then edit these detected privacy neurons by setting their activations to zero. Furthermore, we propose a privacy neuron aggregator dememorize private information in a batch processing manner. Experimental results show that our method can significantly and efficiently reduce the exposure of private data leakage without deteriorating the performance of the model. Additionally, we empirically demonstrate the relationship between model memorization and privacy neurons, from multiple perspectives, including model size, training time, prompts, privacy neuron distribution, illustrating the robustness of our approach.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Distribution Preference Optimization: A Fine-grained Perspective for LLM Unlearning

    cs.LG 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    DiPO is a distribution-level unlearning method that constructs preference distributions from the model's own high-confidence logits and achieves state-of-the-art forget quality on TOFU while preserving utility.

  2. Invisible Watermarks, Visible Gains: Steering Machine Unlearning with Bi-Level Watermarking Design

    cs.CR 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Water4MU tunes an invisible watermark on data so that machine unlearning algorithms can remove requested images more effectively, beating prior methods on 'challenging forgets'.

  3. Towards Evaluation for Real-World LLM Unlearning

    cs.AI 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    DCUE evaluates LLM unlearning by comparing core-token confidence score distributions of the unlearned model and the original model, corrected by a validation set, using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.

  4. Unlearning Isn't Invisible: Detecting Unlearning Traces in LLMs from Model Outputs

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Unlearning in LLMs leaves detectable 'fingerprints' that let a simple classifier distinguish an unlearned model from its original, even on unrelated prompts.

  5. Step-by-Step Reasoning Attack: Revealing 'Erased' Knowledge in Large Language Models

    cs.CR 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    Step-by-step reasoning prompts can recover purportedly erased facts from unlearned LLMs, but the paper's quantitative evidence is internally inconsistent.

Pith tools