Privacy-Preserving LLM Embedding Transmission for End-Cloud Collaboration

Recent studies improve on-device language model (LM) inference through end-cloud collaboration, where the end device retrieves useful information from cloud databases to enhance local processing, known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Typically, to retrieve information from the cloud while safeguarding privacy, the end device transforms original data into embeddings with a local embedding model. However, the recently emerging Embedding Inversion Attacks (EIAs) can still recover the original data from text embeddings (e.g., training a recovery model to map embeddings back to original texts), posing a significant threat to user privacy. To address this risk, we propose EntroGuard, an entropy-driven perturbation-based embedding privacy protection method, which can protect the privacy of text embeddings while maintaining retrieval accuracy during the end-cloud collaboration. Specifically, to defeat various EIAs, we perturb the embeddings to increase the entropy of the recovered text in the common structure of transformer-based recovery models, thus steering the embeddings toward meaningless texts rather than original sensitive texts during the recovery process. To maintain retrieval performance in the cloud, we constrain the perturbations within a bound, applying the strategy of reducing them where redundant and increasing them where sparse. Moreover, EntroGuard can be directly integrated into end devices without requiring any modifications to the embedding model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that EntroGuard effectively reduces privacy leakage metrics to near-zero levels against learning-based EIAs while also mitigating optimization-based EIAs with negligible loss of retrieval performance.