Privacy Preservation of Large Language Models in the Metaverse Era: Research Frontiers, Categorical Comparisons, and Future Directions

Large language models (LLMs), with their billions to trillions of parameters, excel in natural language processing, machine translation, dialogue systems, and text summarization. These capabilities are increasingly pivotal in the Metaverse, where they can enhance virtual interactions and environments. However, their extensive use, particularly in the Metaverse’s immersive platforms, raises significant privacy concerns. This paper analyzes existing privacy issues in LLMs, vital for both traditional and Metaverse applications, and examines protection techniques across the entire life cycle of these models, from training to user deployment. We delve into cryptography, embedding layer encoding, differential privacy and its variants, and adversarial networks, highlighting their relevance in the Metaverse context. Specifically, we explore technologies like homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computation, which are essential for Metaverse security. Our discussion on Gaussian differential privacy, Renyi differential privacy, Edgeworth accounting, and the generation of adversarial samples and loss functions, emphasizes their importance in the Metaverse’s dynamic and interactive environments. Lastly, the paper discusses the current research status and future challenges in the security of LLMs within and beyond the Metaverse, emphasizing urgent problems and potential areas for exploration.