The paper addresses a flaw in differential privacy audits where selection bias in Membership Inference Attacks leads to overestimated lower bounds on privacy leakage. By applying statistical correction methods, the authors demonstrate that uncorrected audits can violate theoretical privacy guarantees up to four times more often than claimed, while corrected audits maintain valid bounds at the nominal confidence level.
arXiv:2608.28934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has traditionally been used to provide theoretical upper bounds on an algorithm's stability to changing its training data. In...
The paper introduces a shift‑aware score transport method for privacy auditing that does not require retraining the target model. It estimates the in‑distribution non‑member score distribution from out‑of‑distribution data, transports this relationship to the target covariate distribution, and applies a conservative correction to account for potential extrapolation errors. Experiments on multiple datasets with distribution shifts show that the method provides more stable privacy estimates while maintaining tighter lower bounds than existing baselines.
arXiv:2606. 16952v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets.
arXiv:2606. 16952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets.
arXiv:2605. 27292v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Privacy auditing aims to empirically assess privacy leakage in machine learning models using membership inference attacks (MIAs), and to derive lower bounds on differential privacy (DP) parameters.
arXiv:2607. 14607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning (ML) models deployed in sensitive domains such as healthcare, law enforcement, and finance must satisfy not only utility requirements but also fairness and privacy guarantees.
arXiv:2607. 16620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) is increasingly deployed to limit membership inference risk in machine-learning systems.
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.
arXiv:2606. 12733v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Privacy auditing provides an important safeguard by estimating the actual information leaked by a model, thus ensuring that theoretical privacy guarantees hold in practice.
The paper investigates the privacy risks inherent in auditing machine unlearning (MU) when the audit relies only on querying the model for behavioral signals. It shows that such generic audit schemes inevitably leak information about the retained data set, providing a geometric transfer theorem that bounds the distinguishability of retained set membership based on audit accuracy. The study also analyzes how the unlearned set, target sample, and query protocol influence the privacy‑audit transfer coefficient, with empirical evidence from both convex and non‑convex models supporting the theoretical findings.
arXiv:2503. 10945v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current practices for reporting differential privacy (DP) guarantees for machine learning (ML) algorithms such as DP-SGD provide an incomplete and potentially misleading picture.
arXiv:2602. 02819v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) aim to distinguish training points (members) from unseen data (non-members), and are widely used to quantify memorization and assess privacy risks.