arXiv Machine Learning

Bayesian Membership Privacy for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606. 04069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing privacy analyses for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) largely inherit assumptions from non-graph settings, overlooking structural correlations and stochastic training-graph sampling.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Empirical Auditing of Edge-Private Graph Generators

The paper presents an empirical audit of privacy leakage in edge‑private graph generators by testing whether outputs from edge‑neighbouring inputs remain distinguishable. It introduces statistically valid lower bounds on privacy loss and compares direct‑edge, local‑structural, and GNN‑based attacks based on the geometry around a target edge. Experiments on two generators and two networks reveal that privacy leakage varies with both the mechanism and the network, and that learned representations expose information beyond conventional local statistics.

By Anum Fatima, Stratis Limnios, James Adams, Lukasz Szpruch, Carsten Maple, Gesine Reinert, Andrew Elliott
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Are LLM-Enhanced GNNs Privacy-Safe?

The paper evaluates privacy risks in graph neural networks enhanced by large language models (LLMs). Using a five‑stage framework, the authors test six real‑world text‑attributed graph datasets with 42 model configurations and six privacy attack methods across link, label, and membership inference threats. Results show that LLM‑enhanced GNNs are more vulnerable than shallow baselines, with semantic enrichment amplifying exploitable signals, and that differential privacy can reduce risk but at a significant cost to utility.

By Longzhu He, Zelang Wen, Chaozhuo Li, Sen Su
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

EdgeRefine: Privacy-Utility Balance for Graphs via Jaccard Sampling under Edge Differential Privacy

arXiv:2607. 08659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown considerable success in learning from graph-structured data, but their use in privacy-sensitive areas remains difficult because graph structure can leak sensitive link information.

By Wenxiu Ding, Muzhi Liu, Zheng Yan, Mingjun Wang, Yifan Zhao, Qiao Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Trust-But-Verify: Poisoning-Resilient Locally Private Graph Learning Protocols

The paper introduces VERITAS, a poisoning‑resilient protocol for locally private graph learning that combines local differential privacy with a trust‑but‑verify approach. VERITAS employs a verification list to encode peer trust, performs local data perturbation, server‑side malicious node pruning, dual denoising, and robust private graph learning. Experiments on four real‑world datasets show that VERITAS defends against data poisoning attacks while improving downstream graph learning utility under strict privacy guarantees.

By Longzhu He, Li Sun, Hao Peng, Ruijie Wang, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong, Sen Su
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Batch Normalization Amplifies Memorization and Privacy Risks

Batch Normalization (BN) is widely used to speed up and stabilize deep neural network training, yet its effect on privacy and memorization has been largely unexplored. This study shows that BN significantly increases the memorization of atypical or outlier samples, as evidenced by unintended memorization, per-sample influence, and heightened susceptibility to membership inference attacks across multiple datasets and architectures. A mechanistic analysis of the BN backward pass reveals that BN amplifies the per‑step margin growth of outlier samples during training, thereby intensifying their influence.

By Ngoc Phu Doan, Chongyan Gu, Ihsen Alouani