# A General Pseudonymization Framework for Cloud-Based LLMs: Replacing Privacy Information in Controlled Text Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15233 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15233/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [The Secret Sharer: Evaluating and Testing Unintended Memorization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08232/) (2018)
- [SAMSum Corpus: A Human-annotated Dialogue Dataset for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12237/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Strong Differentially Private Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05679/) (2021)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Mitigates Privacy Risks in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06539/) (2022)
- [What Does it Mean for a Language Model to Preserve Privacy?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05520/) (2022)
- [Towards Building the Federated GPT: Federated Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05644/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Homomorphic Encryption Schemes: Theory and Implementation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03578/) (2017)
- [On Protecting the Data Privacy of Large Language Models (LLMs): A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05156/) (2024)
- [DP-Forward: Fine-tuning and Inference on Language Models with Differential Privacy in Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06746/) (2023)
- [Federated Foundation Models: Privacy-Preserving and Collaborative Learning for Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11414/) (2023)
- [Survey: Leakage and Privacy at Inference Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01614/) (2021)
- [Hide and Seek (HaS): A Lightweight Framework for Prompt Privacy Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03057/) (2023)
- [CoGenesis: A Framework Collaborating Large and Small Language Models for Secure Context-Aware Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03129/) (2024)
- [FwdLLM: Efficient FedLLM using Forward Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13894/) (2023)
- [Protecting User Privacy in Remote Conversational Systems: A Privacy-Preserving framework based on text sanitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08223/) (2023)
- [Privacy- and Utility-Preserving NLP with Anonymized Data: A case study of Pseudonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05561/) (2023)
- [Privacy Partitioning: Protecting User Data During the Deep Learning Inference Phase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02863/) (2018)
- [Fusion: Efficient and Secure Inference Resilient to Malicious Servers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03040/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Self-Refining Language Model Anonymizers via Adversarial Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01420/) (2025)
- [GRASP: Reinforcing Language Model Anonymizers with Group Relative Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06526/) (2026)
- [PrivBench: A Holistic and Modular Benchmarking Platform for Evaluating Text-to-Text Privatization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29624/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An increasing number of companies have begun providing services that leverage cloud-based large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. However, this development raises substantial privacy concerns, as users' prompts are transmitted to and processed by the model providers. Among the various privacy protection methods for LLMs, those implemented during the pre-training and fine-tuning phrases fail to mitigate the privacy risks associated with the remote use of cloud-based LLMs by users. On the other hand, methods applied during the inference phrase are primarily effective in scenarios where the LLM's inference does not rely on privacy-sensitive information. In this paper, we outline the process of remote user interaction with LLMs and, for the first time, propose a detailed definition of a general pseudonymization framework applicable to cloud-based LLMs. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework strikes an optimal balance between privacy protection and utility. The code for our method is available to the public at https://github.com/Mebymeby/Pseudonymization-Framework.
