PrivDiffuser: Privacy-Guided Diffusion Model for Data Obfuscation in Sensor Networks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sensor data collected by Internet of Things (IoT) devices can reveal sensitive personal information about individuals, raising significant privacy concerns when shared with semi-trusted service providers, as they may extract this information using machine learning models. Data obfuscation empowered by generative models is a promising approach to generate synthetic data such that useful information contained in the original data is preserved while sensitive information is obscured. This newly generated data will then be shared with service providers instead of the original sensor data. In this work, we propose PrivDiffuser, a novel data obfuscation technique based on a denoising diffusion model that achieves a superior trade-off between data utility and privacy by incorporating effective guidance techniques. Specifically, we extract latent representations that contain information about public and private attributes from sensor data to guide the diffusion model, and impose mutual information-based regularization when learning the latent representations to alleviate the entanglement of public and private attributes, thereby increasing the effectiveness of guidance. Evaluation on three real-world datasets containing different sensing modalities reveals that PrivDiffuser yields a better privacy-utility trade-off than the state-of-the-art in data obfuscation, decreasing the utility loss by up to 1.81% and the privacy loss by up to 3.42%. Moreover, compared with existing obfuscation approaches, PrivDiffuser offers the unique benefit of allowing users with diverse privacy needs to protect their privacy without having to retrain the generative model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".