mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Personalized Privacy Control in LLMs via Attention Head Intervention

arXiv 2608.21209 ↗First posted 21 Aug 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.LGcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

The rise of agentic AI enables LLMs to access diverse user data, raising critical privacy concerns. Prior work on contextual privacy studies whether LLMs regulate information disclosure according to context-dependent norms. However, acceptable disclosure boundaries may vary across users even within the same context. To address this limitation, we introduce textitpersonalized privacy, which incorporates user-specific disclosure preferences into privacy control. We further present P3Bench~(Personalized Privacy Preservation Benchmark), a novel benchmark extending contextual privacy policies with personalized disclosure policies. Experiments show that prompt-based policies fail to reliably enforce personalized privacy policies, with Qwen2.5-7B and Gemma3-4B showing average policy ignorance ratios of 51.25% and 74.28%, respectively. Finally, to address this problem, we propose textscRepair, a robust inference-time attention head intervention method that adjusts disclosure behavior toward policy-consistent responses. Our method significantly improves adherence to user-specific privacy preferences by reducing cases where the model fails to follow the given policy.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 11 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2026.

Builds on

11 of 18 references.

References · 11

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  2. 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,374
  3. 2022Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPTcited by 2,691
  4. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,242
  5. 2023Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Additioncited by 1,085
  6. 2022Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Modelscited by 437
  7. 2023Can LLMs Keep a Secret? Testing Privacy Implications of Language Models via Contextual Integrity Theorycited by 230
  8. 2024How to use and interpret activation patchingcited by 214
  9. 2024Programming Refusal with Conditional Activation Steeringcited by 206
  10. 2024PrivacyLens: Evaluating Privacy Norm Awareness of Language Models in Actioncited by 171
  11. 2025Leaky Thoughts: Large Reasoning Models Are Not Private Thinkerscited by 28

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  1. 2025Personalizing Agent Privacy Decisions via Logical Entailment
  2. 2026CIDER: A Dataset of Contextual Disclosure Boundaries for Privacy Preference Alignment
  3. 20251-2-3 Check: Enhancing Contextual Privacy in LLM via Multi-Agent Reasoning
  4. 2026It Takes Two: Complementary Self-Distillation for Contextual Integrity in LLMs
  5. 2024Empowering Users in Digital Privacy Management through Interactive LLM-Based Agents
  6. 2026PrivacyAlign: Contextual Privacy Alignment for LLM Agents
  7. 2026PrivAct: Internalizing Contextual Privacy Preservation via Multi-Agent Preference Training
  8. 2025Contextual Integrity in LLMs via Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning