Personalized Privacy Control in LLMs via Attention Head Intervention
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
Title:Personalized Privacy Control in LLMs via Attention Head Intervention
Abstract:The rise of agentic AI enables LLMs to access diverse user data, raising critical privacy concerns. Prior work on contextual privacy studies whether LLMs regulate information disclosure according to context-dependent norms. However, acceptable disclosure boundaries may vary across users even within the same context. To address this limitation, we introduce \textit{personalized privacy}, which incorporates user-specific disclosure preferences into privacy control. We further present P3Bench~(\textbf{P}ersonalized \textbf{P}rivacy \textbf{P}reservation \textbf{Bench}mark), a novel benchmark extending contextual privacy policies with personalized disclosure policies. Experiments show that prompt-based policies fail to reliably enforce personalized privacy policies, with Qwen2.5-7B and Gemma3-4B showing average policy ignorance ratios of 51.25\% and 74.28\%, respectively. Finally, to address this problem, we propose \textsc{Repair}, a robust inference-time attention head intervention method that adjusts disclosure behavior toward policy-consistent responses. Our method significantly improves adherence to user-specific privacy preferences by reducing cases where the model fails to follow the given policy.
| Comments: | EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.21209 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2608.21209v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.21209
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