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DEPN: Detecting and Editing Privacy Neurons in Pretrained Language Models (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Nov 10, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It hunts down the individual nerve cells inside a trained language model that hold private details, then switches them off so the model stops repeating them. This cut private data leaks sharply while leaving the model's normal answers working as well as before.

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.

Xinwei Wu, Junzhuo Li, Minghui Xu, Weilong Dong, Shuangzhi Wu, Chao Bian, Deyi Xiong
arXiv:2310.20138 · cs.CR, cs.CL · submitted Oct 31, 2023 · updated Dec 5, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · EMNLP 2023

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