Fine-Grained Privacy Extraction from Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems by Exploiting Knowledge Asymmetry

Yufei Chen, Yao Wang, Haibin Zhang, Tao Gu

Keywords: RAG, knowledge asymmetry, privacy extraction, cross-domain generalization

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge bases, significantly improving their factual accuracy and contextual relevance. However, this integration also introduces new privacy vulnerabilities. Existing privacy attacks on RAG systems may trigger data leakage, but they often fail to accurately isolate knowledge base-derived content within mixed responses and perform poorly in multi-domain settings. In this paper, we propose a novel black-box attack framework that exploits knowledge asymmetry between RAG systems and standard LLMs to enable fine-grained privacy extraction across heterogeneous knowledge domains. Our approach decomposes adversarial queries to maximize information divergence between the models, then applies semantic relationship scoring to resolve lexical and syntactic ambiguities. These features are used to train a neural classifier capable of precisely identifying response segments that contain private or sensitive information. Unlike prior methods, our framework generalizes to unseen domains through iterative refinement without requiring prior knowledge of the corpus. Experimental results show that our method achieves over 90\% extraction accuracy in single-domain scenarios and 80\% in multi-domain settings, outperforming baselines by over 30\% in key evaluation metrics. These results represent the first systematic solution for fine-grained privacy localization in RAG systems, exposing critical security vulnerabilities and paving the way for stronger, more resilient defenses.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 7145