English

Controlled Generation for Private Synthetic Text

Computation and Language 2025-10-01 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Text anonymization is essential for responsibly developing and deploying AI in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, social services, and law. In this work, we propose a novel methodology for privacy-preserving synthetic text generation that leverages the principles of de-identification and the Hiding In Plain Sight (HIPS) theory. Our approach introduces entity-aware control codes to guide controllable generation using either in-context learning (ICL) or prefix tuning. The ICL variant ensures privacy levels consistent with the underlying de-identification system, while the prefix tuning variant incorporates a custom masking strategy and loss function to support scalable, high-quality generation. Experiments on legal and clinical datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a strong balance between privacy protection and utility, offering a practical and effective solution for synthetic text generation in sensitive domains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.25729,
  title  = {Controlled Generation for Private Synthetic Text},
  author = {Zihao Zhao and Anjalie Field},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.25729},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

EMNLP 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:06:42.282Z