Fundamental Limits of Membership Inference Attacks on Machine Learning Models
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Membership inference attacks (MIA) can reveal whether a particular data point was part of the training dataset, potentially exposing sensitive information about individuals. This article provides theoretical guarantees by exploring the fundamental statistical limitations associated with MIAs on machine learning models at large. More precisely, we first derive the statistical quantity that governs the effectiveness and success of such attacks. We then theoretically prove that in a non-linear regression setting with overfitting learning procedures, attacks may have a high probability of success. Finally, we investigate several situations for which we provide bounds on this quantity of interest. Interestingly, our findings indicate that discretizing the data might enhance the learning procedure's security. Specifically, it is demonstrated to be limited by a constant, which quantifies the diversity of the underlying data distribution. We illustrate those results through simple simulations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it