@inproceedings{yao-etal-2026-adaptive,
    title = "Adaptive Backtracking for Privacy Protection in Large Language Models",
    author = "Yao, Zhihao  and
      Gu, Yuxuan  and
      Feng, Xiachong  and
      Ma, Weitao  and
      Li, Bo  and
      Feng, Xiaocheng  and
      Qin, Bing",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1857/",
    pages = "37278--37298",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "The privacy leakage problem has become a critical topic in large language models, especially in the scenario of retrieval augmented generation.Current defense methods mitigate privacy leakage but are still suffering from the trade-off between privacy protection and response availability.To address the problem, we propose to explicitly capture the latent leakage tendency of LLM during the generation process, which is able to protect privacy from a more fundamental perspective.In detail, we propose ABack, a training-free mechanism that synchronously monitors the decoding steps, derives the initial leakage intention via modeling mental states, and rewrites the response with privacy awareness. In addition, we construct a new benchmark especially for personally identifiable information, considering the lack of formal privacy datasets.Experiments show that ABack improves privacy by up to 14{\%} over strong baselines against adversarial attacks, avoiding the degradation of response utility."
}