Gradient-Leaks: Enabling Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks Against Machine Learning Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Machine Learning (ML) techniques have been applied to many real-world applications to perform a wide range of tasks. In practice, ML models are typically deployed as the black-box APIs to protect the model owner’s benefits and/or defend against various privacy attacks. In this paper, we present Gradient-Leaks as the first evidence showcasing the possibility of performing membership inference attacks (MIAs), with mere black-box access, which aim to determine whether a data record was utilized to train a given target ML model or not. The key idea of Gradient-Leaks is to construct a local ML model around the given record which locally approximates the target model’s prediction behavior. By extracting the membership information of the given record from the gradient of the substituted local model using an intentionally modified autoencoder, Gradient-Leaks can thus breach the membership privacy of the target model’s training data in an unsupervised manner, without any priori knowledge about the target model’s internals or its training data. Extensive experiments on different types of ML models with real-world datasets have shown that Gradient-Leaks can achieve a better performance compared with state-of-the-art attacks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".