inference attack
Unifying Re-Identification, Attribute Inference, and Data Reconstruction Risks in Differential Privacy
Differentially private (DP) mechanisms are difficult to interpret and calibrate because existing methods for mapping standard privacy parameters to concrete privacy risks--re-identification, attribute inference, and data reconstruction--are both overly pessimistic and inconsistent. In this work, we use the hypothesistesting interpretation of DP (f-DP), and determine that bounds on attack success can take the same unified form across re-identification, attribute inference, and data reconstruction risks. Our unified bounds are (1) consistent across a multitude of attack settings, and (2) tunable, enabling practitioners to evaluate risk with respect to arbitrary, including worst-case, levels of baseline risk. Empirically, our results are tighter than prior methods using ε-DP, R enyi DP, and concentrated DP. As a result, calibrating noise using our bounds can reduce the required noise by 20% at the same risk level, which yields, e.g., an accuracy increase from 52% to 70% in a text classification task. Overall, this unifying perspective provides a principled framework for interpreting and calibrating the degree of protection in DP against specific levels of re-identification, attribute inference, or data reconstruction risk.
Vid-SME: Membership Inference Attacks against Large Video Understanding Models
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in handling complex multimodal tasks and are increasingly adopted in video understanding applications. However, their rapid advancement raises serious data privacy concerns, particularly given the potential inclusion of sensitive video content, such as personal recordings and surveillance footage, in their training datasets. Determining improperly used videos during training remains a critical and unresolved challenge. Despite considerable progress on membership inference attacks (MIAs) for text and image data in MLLMs, existing methods fail to generalize effectively to the video domain. These methods suffer from poor scalability as more frames are sampled and generally achieve negligible true positive rates at low false positive rates (TPR@Low FPR), mainly due to their failure to capture the inherent temporal variations of video frames and to account for model behavior differences as the number of frames varies. To address these challenges, we introduce Vid-SME (Video Sharma-Mittal Entropy), the first membership inference method tailored for video data used in video understanding LLMs (VULLMs). Vid-SME leverages the confidence of model output and integrates adaptive parameterization to compute Sharma-Mittal entropy (SME) for video inputs. By leveraging the SME difference between natural and temporally-reversed video frames, Vid-SME derives robust membership scores to determine whether a given video is part of the model's training set. Experiments on various self-trained and open-sourced VULLMs demonstrate the strong effectiveness of Vid-SME.
Tracing the Roots: Leveraging Temporal Dynamics in Diffusion Trajectories for Origin Attribution
Diffusion models have transformed image synthesis through iterative denoising, by defining trajectories from noise to coherent data. While their capabilities are widely celebrated, a critical challenge remains unaddressed: ensuring responsible use by verifying whether an image originates from a model's training set, its novel generations or external sources. We introduce a framework that analyzes diffusion trajectories for this purpose. Specifically, we demonstrate that temporal dynamics across the entire trajectory allow for more robust classification and challenge the widely-adopted "Goldilocks zone" conjecture, which posits that membership inference is effective only within narrow denoising stages. More fundamentally, we expose critical flaws in current membership inference practices by showing that representative methods fail under distribution shifts or when model-generated data is present. For model attribution, we demonstrate a first white-box approach directly applicable to diffusion. Ultimately, we propose the unification of data provenance into a single, cohesive framework tailored to modern generative systems.
Can We Infer Confidential Properties of Training Data from LLMs?
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned on domain-specific datasets to support applications in fields such as healthcare, finance, and law. These fine-tuning datasets often have sensitive and confidential dataset-level properties -- such as patient demographics or disease prevalence--that are not intended to be revealed. While prior work has studied property inference attacks on discriminative models (e.g., image classification models) and generative models (e.g., GANs for image data), it remains unclear if such attacks transfer to LLMs. In this work, we introduce PropInfer, a benchmark task for evaluating property inference in LLMs under two fine-tuning paradigms: question-answering and chat-completion. Built on the ChatDoctor dataset, our benchmark includes a range of property types and task configurations. We further propose two tailored attacks: a prompt-based generation attack and a shadow-model attack leveraging word frequency signals.
Practical Bayes-Optimal Membership Inference Attacks
We develop practical and theoretically grounded membership inference attacks (MIAs) against both independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data and graphstructured data. Building on the Bayesian decision-theoretic framework of [1], we derive the Bayes-optimal membership inference rule for node-level MIAs against graph neural networks, addressing key open questions about optimal query strategies in the graph setting. We introduce BASE and G-BASE, tractable approximations of the Bayes-optimal membership inference. G-BASE achieves superior performance compared to previously proposed classifier-based node-level MIA attacks. BASE, which is also applicable to non-graph data, matches or exceeds the performance of prior state-of-the-art MIAs, such as LiRA and RMIA, at a significantly lower computational cost. Finally, we show that BASE and RMIA are equivalent under a specific hyperparameter setting, providing a principled, Bayes-optimal justification for the RMIA attack.