Pith. sign in

REVIEW 17 cited by

Do Membership Inference Attacks Work on Large Language Models?

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2402.07841 v2 pith:ZMRRB3PS submitted 2024-02-12 cs.CL

Do Membership Inference Attacks Work on Large Language Models?

classification cs.CL
keywords miasmodelsdatainferencelanguagelargemembershipsettings
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) attempt to predict whether a particular datapoint is a member of a target model's training data. Despite extensive research on traditional machine learning models, there has been limited work studying MIA on the pre-training data of large language models (LLMs). We perform a large-scale evaluation of MIAs over a suite of language models (LMs) trained on the Pile, ranging from 160M to 12B parameters. We find that MIAs barely outperform random guessing for most settings across varying LLM sizes and domains. Our further analyses reveal that this poor performance can be attributed to (1) the combination of a large dataset and few training iterations, and (2) an inherently fuzzy boundary between members and non-members. We identify specific settings where LLMs have been shown to be vulnerable to membership inference and show that the apparent success in such settings can be attributed to a distribution shift, such as when members and non-members are drawn from the seemingly identical domain but with different temporal ranges. We release our code and data as a unified benchmark package that includes all existing MIAs, supporting future work.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 17 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Learning the Signature of Memorization in Autoregressive Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-04 accept novelty 8.0

    A classifier trained only on transformer fine-tuning data detects an invariant memorization signature that transfers to Mamba, RWKV-4, and RecurrentGemma with AUCs of 0.963, 0.972, and 0.936.

  2. WARP: Weight-Space Analysis for Recovering Training Data Portfolios

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    WARP recovers training domain mixtures from fine-tuned model weights using weight-space interpolation via model merging to generate pseudo-checkpoints and geometric features mapped to proportions.

  3. Have You Ever Seen Them? Entity-level Membership Inference through Interrogating Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Entity-level membership inference determines whether information about a target real-world entity was used in LLM training, using only black-box generated text and achieving AUC up to 0.97 on person entities.

  4. SoK: Colluding Adversaries in Machine Learning Pipelines

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    The paper introduces a framework for collusion between train- and inference-time adversaries in ML pipelines, proposes a guideline for conjecturing collusion potential, explains prior work, and empirically validates f...

  5. MRMMIA: Membership Inference Attacks on Memory in Chat Agents

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    MRMMIA is a multi-recall-probe membership inference attack that extracts signals from chat agent memory and outperforms baselines in black-, gray-, and white-box settings.

  6. DistractMIA: Black-Box Membership Inference on Vision-Language Models via Semantic Distraction

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DistractMIA performs output-only black-box membership inference on vision-language models by inserting semantic distractors and measuring shifts in generated text responses.

  7. Decomposing Memorization Reduction in Privacy-Preserving Fine-Tuning of SLMs for CSIRTs

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Controlled experiments across 96 LoRA adapters show that reduced optimizer updates explain nearly all observed memorization drops in DP-SGD fine-tuning, HMAC pseudonymization cuts exposure 40-61% without creating new ...

  8. Auditing Training Data in Generative Music Models via Black-Box Membership Inference

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Black-box membership inference on text-to-music models reaches up to 98.6% accuracy by training an auditor on semantic alignment patterns extracted from shadow-model generations.

  9. TRACER: A Semantic-Aware Framework for Fine-Grained Contamination Detection in Code LLMs

    cs.SE 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    TRACER presents a semantic-aware framework and the first benchmark for fine-grained code contamination detection across three levels of overlap, reporting F1 scores of 0.91-0.92 and large gains over prior methods.

  10. Distinguishable Deletion: Unifying Knowledge Erasure and Refusal for Large Language Model Unlearning

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Distinguishable Deletion unifies knowledge erasure and refusal for LLM unlearning via an energy index that enforces boundaries during training and enables refusal at inference.

  11. Black-box model classification under the discriminative factorization

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Discriminative factorization distinguishes high-quality query sets for black-box model classification, with chance-level error decaying exponentially in query budget and parameters predicting empirical decay rates on ...

  12. Pop Quiz Attack: Black-box Membership Inference Attacks Against Large Language Models

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PopQuiz Attack infers LLM training data membership by turning examples into quiz questions and measuring answer accuracy, reaching 0.873 average ROC-AUC across six models and outperforming prior methods by 20.6%.

  13. CoLA: A Choice Leakage Attack Framework to Expose Privacy Risks in Subset Training

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CoLA reveals that subset training creates new privacy leakage surfaces via side-channel metadata and model outputs, enabling training-membership and selection-participation membership inference attacks.

  14. From Rookie to Expert: Manipulating LLMs for Automated Vulnerability Exploitation in Enterprise Software

    cs.SE 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RSA prompting enables LLMs to automatically create functional exploits for CVEs in Odoo ERP, succeeding on all tested cases in 3-5 rounds and removing the need for manual effort.

  15. Hey, That's My Data! Token-Only Dataset Inference in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CatShift detects training data membership in LLMs by comparing output shifts induced by fine-tuning on member versus non-member data, relying on catastrophic forgetting without requiring logit access.

  16. Watermarking for Proprietary Dataset Protection

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Watermark-based dataset inference achieves membership detection performance comparable to loss-based methods when subset exposure is high, under alternate assumptions.

  17. Auditing Training Data in Domain-adapted LLMs: LoRA-MINT

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    LoRA-MINT uses perplexity to perform membership inference on LoRA-fine-tuned LLMs, reporting 0.77-0.92 precision across four models and three datasets while outperforming baselines.