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Abstract
How much private information do text embeddings reveal about the original
text? We investigate the problem of embedding \textit{inversion},
reconstructing the full text represented in dense text embeddings. We frame the
problem as controlled generation: generating text that, when reembedded, is
close to a fixed point in latent space. We find that although a na\"ive model
conditioned on the embedding performs poorly, a multi-step method that
iteratively corrects and re-embeds text is able to recover $92\%$ of
$32\text{-token}$ text inputs exactly. We train our model to decode text
embeddings from two state-of-the-art embedding models, and also show that our
model can recover important personal information (full names) from a dataset of
clinical notes. Our code is available on Github:
\href{https://github.com/jxmorris12/vec2text}{github.com/jxmorris12/vec2text}.