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Ayana Hussain

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Publications

Loose Lips: Understanding Privacy Leakage in Agentic Dialogue
Soumya Sharma
Ayana Hussain
Héber H. Arcolezi
Ulrich Aivodji
Spandana Gella
Adriana Romero
Golnoosh Farnadi
As LLM agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes enterprise settings, understanding how they handle sensitive information in agentic d… (see more)ialogue has become critical. Privacy leakage in such settings requires reasoning about whether information flows respect the contextual norms under which they originated. We extend CIMemories to CIMEMORIES DIALOGUE, a benchmark of 4,410 two-agent dialogue instances grounded in Contextual Integrity theory. Using this benchmark, we systematically evaluate 7 open-weight models from the Qwen3 and Llama 3.1 families across conversation lengths of 1 and 6 turns under three prompting conditions. We find that task capability and privacy leakage are fundamentally coupled: more capable models are systematically leakier, with no model in our evaluation able to decouple the two. Thinking models consistently leak more than their non-thinking counterparts, a pattern we attribute to the extended reasoning surface created by chain-of-thought. Leakage compounds with conversation length, rising up to 3x from 1 to 6 turns. Our results suggest that the coupling between task capability and privacy leakage is not an artifact of misconfiguration but a structural feature of current agentic systems.
2026-10-06
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
IDP-Bench: Benchmarking ability of LLMs to protect personal information in interdependent privacy contexts
Ayana Hussain
Soumya Sharma
Golnoosh Farnadi
Nicholas Vincent
Héber Hwang Arcolezi
Ulrich Aivodji
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming widely deployed as personal AI assistants with access to sensitive user data, making privacy a maj… (see more)or challenge for their design and evaluation. Prior work focuses mainly on individual-level risks, overlooking \textbf{interdependent privacy (IDP)}--where one person's data may be revealed by others without their knowledge or consent. We address this gap by introducing \textbf{IDP-Bench}: the first LLM benchmark for IDP scenarios, grounded in the Contextual Integrity (CI) framework. We evaluate eight open-source LLMs on their understanding of IDP scenarios across three levels of IDP reasoning using two LLM judges. Results show strong co-ownership recognition (6/8 models exceed 90\%) but persistent weaknesses in identifying CI parameters (information attribute, primary subject) and IDP-specific parameters such as secondary subjects, where 7/8 models score below 74\%. Models also struggle to judge sharing appropriateness (5/8 scoring below 77\%). While the ability to judge the appropriateness of sharing improves with scale, performance tends to decline in smaller models, and prompt sensitivity remains high on IDP-specific questions--highlighting the need for more targeted study of IDP in LLM privacy research. Data \& code available \href{https://github.com/tisl-lab/Interdependent_Privacy_Bench}{here}.
2026-06-05
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Challenges in Using LLM Agents to Validate Agent Governance
Ayana Hussain
Ulrich Aivodji
Héber Hwang Arcolezi
The increasing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) as autonomous agents has intensified the need for credible and trustworthy methods… (see more) to evaluate governance interventions. Motivated by recent research, this work considers the use of LLM and agent-based simulations to evaluate AI agent governance mechanisms before real-world deployment. While conceptually appealing, this approach introduces various challenges. We examine three such problems: (1) obtaining ground truth for validation, (2) determining whether observed behaviors represent actual agent operations or simulation artifacts, and (3) obtaining consent for data use, and addressing ethical concerns about computational surrogates replacing real users. We also outline considerations based on documented limitations, aiming to catalyze workshop discussion on trustworthy and reliable evaluation methods for agent governance.
2026-05-08
PoliSim @ ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net