Strong Membership Inference Attacks on Massive Datasets and (Moderately) Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18773v1
• Date: Sat, 24 May 2025 16:23:43 GMT
• Title: Strong Membership Inference Attacks on Massive Datasets and (Moderately) Large Language Models
• Authors: Jamie Hayes, Ilia Shumailov, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Matthew Jagielski, George Kaissis, Katherine Lee, Milad Nasr, Sahra Ghalebikesabi, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Meenatchi Sundaram Mutu Selva Annamalai, Igor Shilov, Matthieu Meeus, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Franziska Boenisch, Adam Dziedzic, A. Feder Cooper,
• Abstract summary: State-of-the-art membership inference attacks (MIAs) typically require training many reference models, making it difficult to scale these attacks to large pre-trained language models (LLMs)<n>We address this question by scaling LiRA - one of the strongest MIAs - to GPT-2 architectures ranging from 10M to 1B parameters, training reference models on over 20B tokens from the C4 dataset.
• Score: 38.27329422174473
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: State-of-the-art membership inference attacks (MIAs) typically require training many reference models, making it difficult to scale these attacks to large pre-trained language models (LLMs). As a result, prior research has either relied on weaker attacks that avoid training reference models (e.g., fine-tuning attacks), or on stronger attacks applied to small-scale models and datasets. However, weaker attacks have been shown to be brittle - achieving close-to-arbitrary success - and insights from strong attacks in simplified settings do not translate to today's LLMs. These challenges have prompted an important question: are the limitations observed in prior work due to attack design choices, or are MIAs fundamentally ineffective on LLMs? We address this question by scaling LiRA - one of the strongest MIAs - to GPT-2 architectures ranging from 10M to 1B parameters, training reference models on over 20B tokens from the C4 dataset. Our results advance the understanding of MIAs on LLMs in three key ways: (1) strong MIAs can succeed on pre-trained LLMs; (2) their effectiveness, however, remains limited (e.g., AUC<0.7) in practical settings; and, (3) the relationship between MIA success and related privacy metrics is not as straightforward as prior work has suggested.

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