QuanText: Protecting Dataset-Level Secrets in Textual Data Sharing
Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Machine Learning
arXiv:2609.17995 (cs)
[Submitted on 16 Sep 2026]
Title:QuanText: Protecting Dataset-Level Secrets in Textual Data Sharing
View a PDF of the paper titled QuanText: Protecting Dataset-Level Secrets in Textual Data Sharing, by Shuaiqi Wang and 2 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Natural-language datasets support many downstream applications and research studies, but releasing text can reveal sensitive global properties of the underlying data source, such as the proportion of records associated with a particular gender, diagnosis, or political stance. Existing work has largely focused on property inference attacks that recover such global properties, while defenses for protecting these dataset-level secrets remain limited. Differential privacy, although effective for protecting individual records, provides only weak protection for aggregate properties. We propose Randomized Quantization for Text (QuanText), a training-free and large-language-model-agnostic data release mechanism that protects global secrets in textual datasets while preserving data utility. Given a dataset-level secret, such as the proportion of records with a particular diagnosis, and attributes whose utility should be preserved, such as topic and sentiment, QuanText perturbs both the secret distribution and the distributions of correlated attributes. It does so by constructing candidate release distributions over secret and non-secret attributes, randomly selecting a candidate sufficiently close to the private empirical distribution, and rewriting each private text sample to match the selected distribution using attribute-related snippets from the original text. QuanText is inspired by the Statistic Maximal Leakage (SML) framework, which bounds leakage about a secret function of a data distribution. Under idealized conditions, we show that QuanText satisfies an SML guarantee. Since these conditions may not hold exactly in practice, we also evaluate QuanText empirically on real-world datasets. Our results show that QuanText achieves a better empirical privacy-utility trade-off than competing data generation baselines.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.17995 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2609.17995v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17995
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled QuanText: Protecting Dataset-Level Secrets in Textual Data Sharing, by Shuaiqi Wang and 2 other authors
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
IArxiv recommender toggle
IArxiv Recommender
(What is IArxiv?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — Machine Learning
-
Algebraic Integer Quantization for Machine Learning Applications
Oct 12
-
CircuitTree: Composing Circuits into A Syllable Transcriber
Oct 12
-
Behind-the-Meter Photovoltaic Visibility from Net Smart Meters: Deployment Regimes and Operational Insights
Oct 12
-
GlucoPRISM: Protocol-Supervised Pretraining for Cross-Cohort Glucose Transfer
Oct 12
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.