Shaoyang Xu


2024

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Mitigating Privacy Seesaw in Large Language Models: Augmented Privacy Neuron Editing via Activation Patching
Xinwei Wu | Weilong Dong | Shaoyang Xu | Deyi Xiong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Protecting privacy leakage in large language models remains a paramount challenge. In this paper, we reveal Privacy Seesaw in LLM privacy safeguarding, a phenomenon where measures to secure specific private information inadvertently heighten exposure risks for other privacy. Through comprehensive analysis, we identify the amount of targeted privacy data and the volume of edited privacy neurons as the two central triggers to this issue. To mitigate privacy seesaw, we propose Augmented Privacy Neuron Editing via Activation Patching (APNEAP), a novel framework designed to well balance model performance with privacy protection. The proposed APNEAP augments collected private data by automatically synthesizing new private data, which deactivates the first trigger to the privacy seesaw issue. Additionally, it adapts activation patching to privacy neuron editing for switching off the second trigger to the privacy seesaw problem. Experimental results show that the proposed APNEAP is capable of alleviating the privacy seesaw phenomenon and offers a more stable and reliable approach to privacy protection in LLMs than previous methods.

2023

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Language Representation Projection: Can We Transfer Factual Knowledge across Languages in Multilingual Language Models?
Shaoyang Xu | Junzhuo Li | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Multilingual pretrained language models serve as repositories of multilingual factual knowledge. Nevertheless, a substantial performance gap of factual knowledge probing exists between high-resource languages and low-resource languages, suggesting limited implicit factual knowledge transfer across languages in multilingual pretrained language models. This paper investigates the feasibility of explicitly transferring relatively rich factual knowledge from English to non-English languages. To accomplish this, we propose two parameter-free Language Representation Projection modules (LRP2). The first module converts non-English representations into English-like equivalents, while the second module reverts English-like representations back into representations of the corresponding non-English language. Experimental results on the mLAMA dataset demonstrate that LRP2 significantly improves factual knowledge retrieval accuracy and facilitates knowledge transferability across diverse non-English languages. We further investigate the working mechanism of LRP2 from the perspectives of representation space and cross-lingual knowledge neuron.