ObfusLM: Privacy-preserving Language Model Service against Embedding Inversion Attacks

As the rapid expansion of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) for language models, concerns over the privacy of client inputs during inference or fine-tuning have correspondingly escalated. Recently, solutions have been proposed to safeguard client privacy by obfuscation techniques. However, the solutions incur notable decline in model utility and mainly focus on classification tasks, rendering them impractical for real-world applications. Moreover, recent studies reveal that these obfuscation, if not well designed, is susceptible to embedding inversion attacks (EIAs). In this paper, we devise ObfusLM, a privacy-preserving MLaaS framework for both classification and generation tasks. ObfusLM leverages a model obfuscation module to achieve privacy protection for both classification and generation tasks. Based on (k, ϵ)-anonymity, ObfusLM includes novel obfuscation algorithms to reach provable security against EIAs. Extensive experiments show that ObfusLM outperforms existing works in utility by 10% with a nearly 80% resistance rate against EIAs.