arXiv Machine Learning

SoK: Reconstruction Attacks on Synthetic Tabular Data (Insights from Winning the NIST CRC)

arXiv:2606. 08372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic data is increasingly promoted as a privacy-preserving substitute for releasing sensitive tabular records, yet its central adversarial threat ("reconstruction", the recovery of an individual's hidden attribute values from a synthetic release and a handful of known quasi-identifiers) has been studied only in scattered, hard-to-compare settings.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

When T2I Synthetic Data Backfires: Amplified Privacy Risks in Real-Synthetic Mix Training

arXiv:2607. 13541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To overcome data scarcity and privacy constraints in data collection, it has become standard practice across academia and industry to augment real training data with text-to-image (T2I)-generated synthetic data, a paradigm we term Real-Synthetic Mix-Training (RSMT).

By Na Li, Boyu Kuang, Hongsheng Hu, Liquan Chen, Hyoungshick Kim, Yansong Gao, Anmin Fu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Profiling Privacy Preservation Against Gradient Inversion Attacks in Tabular Federated Learning

arXiv:2606. 00986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple data holders to train machine learning models collaboratively without centralizing raw data, making it useful in privacy sensitive domains such as healthcare and institutional data sharing.

By Ivo Osterberg Nilsson, Maximilian Birr Engvall, Viktor Valadi, Teddy Lazebnik
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Rethinking Anonymity Claims in Synthetic Data Generation: A Model-Centric Privacy Attack Perspective

The paper argues that evaluating anonymity in synthetic data generation must focus on the generative model rather than just the resulting dataset. It interprets GDPR definitions of personal data and anonymization under realistic model-access scenarios, mapping these to state‑of‑the‑art privacy attacks. The authors conclude that synthetic data alone is insufficient for anonymization, and that Differential Privacy offers stronger protection than Similarity‑based Privacy Metrics.

By Georgi Ganev, Emiliano De Cristofaro
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Subgroup Membership Inference Audits of Differentially Private Synthetic Text

The paper introduces a subgroup-targeted membership inference game to audit differentially private synthetic text releases, revealing that existing average-case attacks miss significant leakage to vulnerable subgroups. An extensive audit across 32 proxies, four datasets, three generation methods, and five privacy budgets shows that DP reduces overall leakage but leaves concentrated, uneven residual risk, especially for high-risk records. The study demonstrates that which records leak is determined by the release mechanism rather than the records themselves, challenging record-level risk assessment.

By Yidan Sun, Viktor Schlegel, Srinivasan Nandakumar, Siew Kei Lam, Anil Anthony Bharath