---
title: "Defeating Cerberus — paper by Zhang et al. (2026)"
description: "Existing PII benchmarks are text-only, so the authors first build multimodal test sets by turning text PII corpora into images. 42 references."
authors: ["Boyang Zhang", "Istemi Ekin Akkus", "Ruichuan Chen", "Alice Dethise", "Klaus Satzke", "Ivica Rimac", "Yang Zhang"]
year: 2026
venue: "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-eacl.154/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.154"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhang-2026-defeating-cerberus-privacy-leakage-mitigation/"
---
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# Defeating Cerberus: Privacy-Leakage Mitigation in Vision Language Models

**Authors:** [Boyang Zhang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/boyang-zhang/), Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Alice Dethise, Klaus Satzke, Ivica Rimac and [Yang Zhang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/yang-zhang/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/findings/) ([Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/findings/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-eacl.154/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-eacl.154.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.154](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.154) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7140090786)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Vision Language Models can read personal data from images such as scans or ID cards and perform PII extraction at scale. Their safety guardrails can be bypassed through jailbreaks or backdoors, and the visual channel adds another attack surface.

Existing PII benchmarks are text-only, so the authors first build multimodal test sets by turning text PII corpora into images. They use two strategies: direct conversion (rendering Enron emails or synthetic records as documents and tables, with simulated scanning noise) and context injection.

They then propose a concept-guided mitigation inspired by interpretability research. It locates internal states of the LLM backbone linked to PII-related content and amplifies them with a steering coefficient, so the model declines such requests. No retraining or fine-tuning is needed.

The steered models refuse PII tasks 93.3% of the time on average, with little harm to unrelated tasks. One fixed configuration works across all datasets and on PII types absent from the demonstration data. This offers a cheap, deployable privacy safeguard that may transfer to other multimodal LLMs built on similar backbones.

## Key points
- New multimodal PII datasets include PII-Table (tables from ai4privacy synthetic data, with optional "scanned" artifacts), image versions of the Enron email corpus, and CelebA-Info. The authors note that text-to-image models cannot yet render legible PII realistically, which is why they converted text corpora instead.
- Average refusal rate on PII-related tasks is 93.3%, while refusals on non-PII tasks stay negligible. Steering settings were not re-tuned between datasets, and the method also caught unseen types such as social security and credit card numbers.
- Results vary by PII type on CelebA-Info. Address extraction is refused in over 97% of cases for all three backbones, but email is weaker (79.1% for Vicuna-7B), and other email and phone results sit above 80%.
- The steering coefficient study on the Mistral-7B backbone found a clear gap, around 0.4–0.6, between where mitigation weakens and where benign tasks start to suffer. This makes it possible to pick a safe minimal value.
- The method only works if the model already has refusal behavior to amplify, and smaller models may lack the needed concepts. Code and dataset tools are released at github.com/Nokia-Bell-Labs/cerberus.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Helmholtz Center for Information Security](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/helmholtz-center-for-information-security/) — Research institute, Saarbrücken, Germany · 20 works · 1,172 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Boyang Zhang, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Alice Dethise, Klaus Satzke, Ivica Rimac and Yang Zhang. 2026. Defeating Cerberus: Privacy-Leakage Mitigation in Vision Language Models. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{zhang2026defeating,
  title = {{Defeating Cerberus: Privacy-Leakage Mitigation in Vision Language Models}},
  author = {Boyang Zhang, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Alice Dethise, Klaus Satzke, Ivica Rimac and Yang Zhang},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.154},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.154}
}
```

- [← previous DeepSynth-Eval: Objectively Evaluating Information Consolidation in Deep Survey Writing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhang-2026-deepsynth-eval-objectively-evaluating-information/)
- [next → Defending LLMs against Jailbreak Attacks via Template-Based ICL with a Defensive Suffix](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ni-2026-defending-llms-against-jailbreak-attacks/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/29/)

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*Updated 2 November 2026*
