DP-MIND: Differentially private memory-guided Long context Inference

Abstract

LLM-as-a-Service has become a dominant paradigm for accessing large language models without requiring local deployment. However, the process raises severe privacy concerns when user queries may include sensitive or confidential contexts. Differential privacy (DP) provides a principled approach to protecting such inputs, but existing DP inference methods are primarily designed for short- or moderate-context settings and struggle with million-token-scale inputs due to limited context capacity and severe utility degradation under DP perturbation. In this paper, we propose DP-MIND, a memory-guided framework that scales differentially private inference to million-token contexts. DP-MIND enables private long-context inference by locally perturbing the input and processing it chunk by chunk with a compact memory that preserves task-relevant information across the sequence. To make this memory robust to DP noise, we optimize the memory construction policy directly on perturbed inputs using reinforcement learning, guided by both final answer correctness and memory consistency. We further recover perturbation-corrupted answer spans through a local denoising module without exposing the original context to the external model. We provide theoretical privacy analysis of DP-MIND and further conduct extensive empirical analysis across multiple long-context benchmarks with context lengths up to the million-token scale, demonstrating that DP-MIND consistently outperforms existing DP and long-context inference baselines in both scalability and utility.