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Apr 16

Do Phone-Use Agents Respect Your Privacy?

We study whether phone-use agents respect privacy while completing benign mobile tasks. This question has remained hard to answer because privacy-compliant behavior is not operationalized for phone-use agents, and ordinary apps do not reveal exactly what data agents type into which form entries during execution. To make this question measurable, we introduce MyPhoneBench, a verifiable evaluation framework for privacy behavior in mobile agents. We operationalize privacy-respecting phone use as permissioned access, minimal disclosure, and user-controlled memory through a minimal privacy contract, iMy, and pair it with instrumented mock apps plus rule-based auditing that make unnecessary permission requests, deceptive re-disclosure, and unnecessary form filling observable and reproducible. Across five frontier models on 10 mobile apps and 300 tasks, we find that task success, privacy-compliant task completion, and later-session use of saved preferences are distinct capabilities, and no single model dominates all three. Evaluating success and privacy jointly reshuffles the model ordering relative to either metric alone. The most persistent failure mode across models is simple data minimization: agents still fill optional personal entries that the task does not require. These results show that privacy failures arise from over-helpful execution of benign tasks, and that success-only evaluation overestimates the deployment readiness of current phone-use agents. All code, mock apps, and agent trajectories are publicly available at~ https://github.com/tangzhy/MyPhoneBench.

  • 22 authors
·
Apr 1 2

Large Language Models for Data Synthesis

Generating synthetic data that faithfully captures the statistical structure of real-world distributions is a fundamental challenge in data modeling. Classical approaches often depend on strong parametric assumptions or manual structural design and struggle in high-dimensional or heterogeneous domains. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) reveals their potential as flexible, high-dimensional priors over real-world distributions. However, when applied to data synthesis, standard LLM-based sampling is inefficient, constrained by fixed context limits, and fails to ensure statistical alignment. Given this, we introduce LLMSynthor, a general framework for data synthesis that transforms LLMs into structure-aware simulators guided by distributional feedback. LLMSynthor treats the LLM as a nonparametric copula simulator for modeling high-order dependencies and introduces LLM Proposal Sampling to generate grounded proposal distributions that improve sampling efficiency without requiring rejection. By minimizing discrepancies in the summary statistics space, the iterative synthesis loop aligns real and synthetic data while gradually uncovering and refining the latent generative structure. We evaluate LLMSynthor in both controlled and real-world settings using heterogeneous datasets in privacy-sensitive domains (e.g., e-commerce, population, and mobility) that encompass both structured and unstructured formats. The synthetic data produced by LLMSynthor shows high statistical fidelity, practical utility, and cross-data adaptability, positioning it as a valuable tool across economics, social science, urban studies, and beyond.

  • 3 authors
·
May 20, 2025 2

Exploring the Potential of AI-Generated Synthetic Datasets: A Case Study on Telematics Data with ChatGPT

This research delves into the construction and utilization of synthetic datasets, specifically within the telematics sphere, leveraging OpenAI's powerful language model, ChatGPT. Synthetic datasets present an effective solution to challenges pertaining to data privacy, scarcity, and control over variables - characteristics that make them particularly valuable for research pursuits. The utility of these datasets, however, largely depends on their quality, measured through the lenses of diversity, relevance, and coherence. To illustrate this data creation process, a hands-on case study is conducted, focusing on the generation of a synthetic telematics dataset. The experiment involved an iterative guidance of ChatGPT, progressively refining prompts and culminating in the creation of a comprehensive dataset for a hypothetical urban planning scenario in Columbus, Ohio. Upon generation, the synthetic dataset was subjected to an evaluation, focusing on the previously identified quality parameters and employing descriptive statistics and visualization techniques for a thorough analysis. Despite synthetic datasets not serving as perfect replacements for actual world data, their potential in specific use-cases, when executed with precision, is significant. This research underscores the potential of AI models like ChatGPT in enhancing data availability for complex sectors like telematics, thus paving the way for a myriad of new research opportunities.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 23, 2023

ChildDiffusion: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI and Controllable Augmentations for Child Facial Data using Stable Diffusion and Large Language Models

In this research work we have proposed high-level ChildDiffusion framework capable of generating photorealistic child facial samples and further embedding several intelligent augmentations on child facial data using short text prompts, detailed textual guidance from LLMs, and further image to image transformation using text guidance control conditioning thus providing an opportunity to curate fully synthetic large scale child datasets. The framework is validated by rendering high-quality child faces representing ethnicity data, micro expressions, face pose variations, eye blinking effects, facial accessories, different hair colours and styles, aging, multiple and different child gender subjects in a single frame. Addressing privacy concerns regarding child data acquisition requires a comprehensive approach that involves legal, ethical, and technological considerations. Keeping this in view this framework can be adapted to synthesise child facial data which can be effectively used for numerous downstream machine learning tasks. The proposed method circumvents common issues encountered in generative AI tools, such as temporal inconsistency and limited control over the rendered outputs. As an exemplary use case we have open-sourced child ethnicity data consisting of 2.5k child facial samples of five different classes which includes African, Asian, White, South Asian/ Indian, and Hispanic races by deploying the model in production inference phase. The rendered data undergoes rigorous qualitative as well as quantitative tests to cross validate its efficacy and further fine-tuning Yolo architecture for detecting and classifying child ethnicity as an exemplary downstream machine learning task.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

DocDjinn: Controllable Synthetic Document Generation with VLMs and Handwriting Diffusion

Effective document intelligence models rely on large amounts of annotated training data. However, procuring sufficient and high-quality data poses significant challenges due to the labor-intensive and costly nature of data acquisition. Additionally, leveraging language models to annotate real documents raises concerns about data privacy. Synthetic document generation has emerged as a promising, privacy-preserving alternative. We propose DocDjinn, a novel framework for controllable synthetic document generation using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that produces annotated documents from unlabeled seed samples. Our approach generates visually plausible and semantically consistent synthetic documents that follow the distribution of an existing source dataset through clustering-based seed selection with parametrized sampling. By enriching documents with realistic diffusion-based handwriting and contextual visual elements via semantic-visual decoupling, we generate diverse, high-quality annotated synthetic documents. We evaluate across eleven benchmarks spanning key information extraction, question answering, document classification, and document layout analysis. To our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating that VLMs can generate faithful annotated document datasets at scale from unlabeled seeds that can effectively enrich or approximate real, manually annotated data for diverse document understanding tasks. We show that with only 100 real training samples, our framework achieves on average 87% of the performance of the full real-world dataset. We publicly release our code and 140k+ synthetic document samples.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 25

Controllable Reasoning Models Are Private Thinkers

AI agents powered by reasoning models require access to sensitive user data. However, their reasoning traces are difficult to control, which can result in the unintended leakage of private information to external parties. We propose training models to follow instructions not only in the final answer, but also in reasoning traces, potentially under different constraints. We hypothesize that improving their instruction following abilities in the reasoning traces can improve their privacy-preservation skills. To demonstrate this, we fine-tune models on a new instruction-following dataset with explicit restrictions on reasoning traces. We further introduce a generation strategy that decouples reasoning and answer generation using separate LoRA adapters. We evaluate our approach on six models from two model families, ranging from 1.7B to 14B parameters, across two instruction-following benchmarks and two privacy benchmarks. Our method yields substantial improvements, achieving gains of up to 20.9 points in instruction-following performance and up to 51.9 percentage points on privacy benchmarks. These improvements, however, can come at the cost of task utility, due to the trade-off between reasoning performance and instruction-following abilities. Overall, our results show that improving instruction-following behavior in reasoning models can significantly enhance privacy, suggesting a promising direction for the development of future privacy-aware agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2026-controllable-reasoning-models

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 27

Controllable Complex Human Motion Video Generation via Text-to-Skeleton Cascades

Generating videos of complex human motions such as flips, cartwheels, and martial arts remains challenging for current video diffusion models. Text-only conditioning is temporally ambiguous for fine-grained motion control, while explicit pose-based controls, though effective, require users to provide complete skeleton sequences that are costly to produce for long and dynamic actions. We propose a two-stage cascaded framework that addresses both limitations. First, an autoregressive text-to-skeleton model generates 2D pose sequences from natural language descriptions by predicting each joint conditioned on previously generated poses. This design captures long-range temporal dependencies and inter-joint coordination required for complex motions. Second, a pose-conditioned video diffusion model synthesizes videos from a reference image and the generated skeleton sequence. It employs DINO-ALF (Adaptive Layer Fusion), a multi-level reference encoder that preserves appearance and clothing details under large pose changes and self-occlusions. To address the lack of publicly available datasets for complex human motion video generation, we introduce a Blender-based synthetic dataset containing 2,000 videos with diverse characters performing acrobatic and stunt-like motions. The dataset provides full control over appearance, motion, and environment. It fills an important gap because existing benchmarks significantly under-represent acrobatic motions while web-collected datasets raise copyright and privacy concerns. Experiments on our synthetic dataset and the Motion-X Fitness benchmark show that our text-to-skeleton model outperforms prior methods on FID, R-precision, and motion diversity. Our pose-to-video model also achieves the best results among all compared methods on VBench metrics for temporal consistency, motion smoothness, and subject preservation.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 8

ControlNET: A Firewall for RAG-based LLM System

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced the factual accuracy and domain adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs). This advancement has enabled their widespread deployment across sensitive domains such as healthcare, finance, and enterprise applications. RAG mitigates hallucinations by integrating external knowledge, yet introduces privacy risk and security risk, notably data breaching risk and data poisoning risk. While recent studies have explored prompt injection and poisoning attacks, there remains a significant gap in comprehensive research on controlling inbound and outbound query flows to mitigate these threats. In this paper, we propose an AI firewall, ControlNET, designed to safeguard RAG-based LLM systems from these vulnerabilities. ControlNET controls query flows by leveraging activation shift phenomena to detect adversarial queries and mitigate their impact through semantic divergence. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four different benchmark datasets including Msmarco, HotpotQA, FinQA, and MedicalSys using state-of-the-art open source LLMs (Llama3, Vicuna, and Mistral). Our results demonstrate that ControlNET achieves over 0.909 AUROC in detecting and mitigating security threats while preserving system harmlessness. Overall, ControlNET offers an effective, robust, harmless defense mechanism, marking a significant advancement toward the secure deployment of RAG-based LLM systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025

Self-Regularization with Sparse Autoencoders for Controllable LLM-based Classification

Modern text classification methods heavily rely on contextual embeddings from large language models (LLMs). Compared to human-engineered features, these embeddings provide automatic and effective representations for classification model training. However, they also introduce a challenge: we lose the ability to manually remove unintended features, such as sensitive or task-irrelevant features, to guarantee regulatory compliance or improve the generalizability of classification models. This limitation arises because LLM embeddings are opaque and difficult to interpret. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to identify and regularize unintended features in the LLM latent space. Specifically, we first pre-train a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to extract interpretable features from LLM latent spaces. To ensure the SAE can capture task-specific features, we further fine-tune it on task-specific datasets. In training the classification model, we propose a simple and effective regularizer, by minimizing the similarity between the classifier weights and the identified unintended feature, to remove the impact of these unintended features on classification. We evaluate the proposed framework on three real-world tasks, including toxic chat detection, reward modeling, and disease diagnosis. Results show that the proposed self-regularization framework can improve the classifier's generalizability by regularizing those features that are not semantically correlated to the task. This work pioneers controllable text classification on LLM latent spaces by leveraging interpreted features to address generalizability, fairness, and privacy challenges. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/JacksonWuxs/Controllable_LLM_Classifier.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 19, 2025

Auditing and Generating Synthetic Data with Controllable Trust Trade-offs

Data collected from the real world tends to be biased, unbalanced, and at risk of exposing sensitive and private information. This reality has given rise to the idea of creating synthetic datasets to alleviate risk, bias, harm, and privacy concerns inherent in the real data. This concept relies on Generative AI models to produce unbiased, privacy-preserving synthetic data while being true to the real data. In this new paradigm, how can we tell if this approach delivers on its promises? We present an auditing framework that offers a holistic assessment of synthetic datasets and AI models trained on them, centered around bias and discrimination prevention, fidelity to the real data, utility, robustness, and privacy preservation. We showcase our framework by auditing multiple generative models on diverse use cases, including education, healthcare, banking, human resources, and across different modalities, from tabular, to time-series, to natural language. Our use cases demonstrate the importance of a holistic assessment in order to ensure compliance with socio-technical safeguards that regulators and policymakers are increasingly enforcing. For this purpose, we introduce the trust index that ranks multiple synthetic datasets based on their prescribed safeguards and their desired trade-offs. Moreover, we devise a trust-index-driven model selection and cross-validation procedure via auditing in the training loop that we showcase on a class of transformer models that we dub TrustFormers, across different modalities. This trust-driven model selection allows for controllable trust trade-offs in the resulting synthetic data. We instrument our auditing framework with workflows that connect different stakeholders from model development to audit and certification via a synthetic data auditing report.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 21, 2023