Publications

Benchmarking Knowledge-Extraction Attack and Defense on Retrieval-Augmented Generation

KDD 2026 Datasets and Benchmarks Track

Publication date: July 13, 2026

Zhisheng Qi, Utkarsh Sahu, Li Ma, Haoyu Han, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Mahantesh M Halappanavar, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yushun Dong, Yue Zhao, Yu Zhang, Yu Wang

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a cornerstone of agentic, knowledge-intensive applications, ranging from enterprise chatbots to healthcare assistants. Recent studies, however, show that knowledge-extraction attacks can recover sensitive knowledge-base content through maliciously crafted queries, raising serious concerns about intellectual property theft and privacy leakage. While prior work has explored individual attack and defense techniques, the research landscape remains fragmented, spanning heterogeneous retrieval embeddings, diverse generation models, and evaluations based on non-standardized metrics and inconsistent datasets. To address this gap, we introduce the first systematic benchmark for knowledge-extraction attacks on RAG systems. Our benchmark covers a broad spectrum of attack and defense strategies, representative retrieval embedding models, and both open- and closed-source generators, all evaluated under a unified experimental framework with standardized protocols across multiple datasets. By consolidating the experimental landscape and enabling reproducible, comparable evaluation, this benchmark provides actionable insights and a practical foundation for developing privacy-preserving RAG systems in the face of emerging extraction threats.

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