EP-Mem: Elastic Privacy Memory for Social Relationship-Aware LLM Agents

arXiv:2609.35233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents face critical privacy risks when acting as delegates in human-agent-human communication. To prevent such breaches, agents must understand users' social relationships and adhere to context-dependent social information disclosure boundaries. Current studies on agent memory privacy focus on instantaneous interactions, leaving the long-term relational disclosure problem unexplored. In this paper, we propose EP-Mem, an Elastic Privacy Memory architecture that reframes privacy as user-owned boundary control across social roles. EP-Mem introduces (1) token-level memory driven by user-configurable a privacy policy that stratifies persons and events, combining domain-level default circulation rules with fact-level whitelist/blacklist exceptions; and (2) a pluggable sidecar with a privacy engine that aligns disclosure controls with memory across summary, detail, and boundary granularities, enforced throughout generation, storage, and retrieval. We construct EP-Bench, to our knowledge the first long-term multi-party benchmark with cross-session correlated events for policy-conditioned relational disclosure. Experiments show that EP-Mem achieves 94.0% privacy classification accuracy, improves disclosure-permission judgment from 22% to 68%, and reduces privacy leakage by 75.6%, while maintaining retrieval performance and cross-benchmark generalization.

Abstract:Large language model (LLM) agents face critical privacy risks when acting as delegates in human-agent-human communication. To prevent such breaches, agents must understand users' social relationships and adhere to context-dependent social information disclosure boundaries. Current studies on agent memory privacy focus on instantaneous interactions, leaving the long-term relational disclosure problem unexplored. In this paper, we propose EP-Mem, an Elastic Privacy Memory architecture that reframes privacy as user-owned boundary control across social roles. EP-Mem introduces (1) token-level memory driven by user-configurable a privacy policy that stratifies persons and events, combining domain-level default circulation rules with fact-level whitelist/blacklist exceptions; and (2) a pluggable sidecar with a privacy engine that aligns disclosure controls with memory across summary, detail, and boundary granularities, enforced throughout generation, storage, and retrieval. We construct EP-Bench, to our knowledge the first long-term multi-party benchmark with cross-session correlated events for policy-conditioned relational disclosure. Experiments show that EP-Mem achieves 94.0% privacy classification accuracy, improves disclosure-permission judgment from 22% to 68%, and reduces privacy leakage by 75.6%, while maintaining retrieval performance and cross-benchmark generalization.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.35233 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.35233v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35233 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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EP-Mem: Elastic Privacy Memory for Social Relationship-Aware LLM Agents

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