Our work designs privacy attacks, which have the potential to cause harm. The main limitation of our work is the strong threat model under which our attacks work. All of our results on CIFAR-10 make use of fewer than 30000 trained models. We plot the effectiveness of Transfer LiRA in Figure 7. ROC curves for our student attacks are found Further qualitative examples can be found in Figure 9. Ablation of score information CIFAR-10 with duplicates are found in Figure 11. Distillation threat models, which we will consider simultaneously.

Model distillation is frequently proposed as a technique to reduce the privacy leakage of machine learning. These empirical privacy defenses rely on the intuition that distilled "student" models protect the privacy of training data, as they only interact with this data indirectly through a "teacher" model. In this work, we design membership inference attacks to systematically study the privacy provided by knowledge distillation to both the teacher and student training sets. Our new attacks show that distillation alone provides only limited privacy across a number of domains. We explain the success of our attacks on distillation by showing that membership inference attacks on a private dataset can succeed even if the target model is never queried on any actual training points, but only on inputs whose predictions are highly influenced by training data. Finally, we show that our attacks are strongest when student and teacher sets are similar, or when the attacker can poison the teacher set.

From the perspective of statistical learning theory, (1) is rather intriguing. Moreover, they do not provide instance-wise matching lower bounds to verify the tightness of the upper bounds.

Bounding and predicting the generalization gap of overparameterized neural networks remains a central open problem in theoretical machine learning. There is a recent and growing body of literature that proposes the framework of fractals to model optimization trajectories of neural networks, motivating generalization bounds and measures based on the fractal dimension of the trajectory. Notably, the persistent homology dimension has been proposed to correlate with the generalization gap.