Controlling the Extraction of Memorized Data from Large Language Models
  via Prompt-Tuning
Authors: name: Mustafa Safa Ozdayi; name: Charith Peris; name: Jack FitzGerald; name: Christophe Dupuy; name: Jimit Majmudar; name: Haidar Khan; name: Rahil Parikh; name: Rahul Gupta
Published: 2023-05-19 15:45:29

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to memorize significant portions of
their training data. Parts of this memorized content have been shown to be
extractable by simply querying the model, which poses a privacy risk. We
present a novel approach which uses prompt-tuning to control the extraction
rates of memorized content in LLMs. We present two prompt training strategies
to increase and decrease extraction rates, which correspond to an attack and a
defense, respectively. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques by
using models from the GPT-Neo family on a public benchmark. For the 1.3B
parameter GPT-Neo model, our attack yields a 9.3 percentage point increase in
extraction rate compared to our baseline. Our defense can be tuned to achieve
different privacy-utility trade-offs by a user-specified hyperparameter. We
achieve an extraction rate reduction of up to 97.7% relative to our baseline,
with a perplexity increase of 16.9%.