Paper Detail
Ziwen Li, Jianing Wen, Tianshi Li
Agentic LLMs with web search change the threat model for text anonymization: weak contextual cues can become cross-referenceable evidence for re-identification, yet those same details also carry downstream analytic value of the text. Existing defenses either remove explicit identifiers, perturb text for formal privacy, or test rewritten text against non-web inference models, leaving underexplored the operating region between resistance to agentic web-search re-identification and utility retention. We introduce AURA (Anonymization with Utility-Retention Adaptation), an LLM-powered mask-reconstruct framework that decouples privacy localization from utility-preserving reconstruction and selects candidates with adversarial privacy and utility-retention checks. We evaluate AURA on real-user interview transcripts using re-identification attacks carried out by web-search agents, along with a utility evaluation based on interviewee-profile facts, codebook facts, and the joint contextual utility grid. Our results show that AURA improves the privacy-utility frontier by using adaptive privacy scope to strengthen resistance to agentic re-identification and using a mask-reconstruct anonymization method to better preserve contextual utility under fixed privacy scope.
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@misc{li2026llm,
title = {LLM Anonymization Against Agentic Re-Identification},
author = {Ziwen Li and Jianing Wen and Tianshi Li},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Agentic LLMs with web search change the threat model for text anonymization: weak contextual cues can become cross-referenceable evidence for re-identification, yet those same details also carry downstream analytic value of the text. Existing defenses either remove explicit identifiers, perturb text for formal privacy, or test rewritten text against non-web inference models, leaving underexplored the operating region between resistance to agentic web-search re-identification and utility retentio},
url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.30848},
keywords = {LLM-powered, mask-reconstruct, anonymization, agentic web-search, re-identification, privacy-utility frontier, adaptive privacy scope, contextual utility, code available, huggingface daily},
eprint = {2605.30848},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}