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.
arXiv:2410. 06814v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Over-parameterized models are typically vulnerable to membership inference attacks, which aim to determine whether a specific sample is included in the training of a given model.
The paper investigates whether inexpensive spectral metrics from the heavy‑tailed self‑regularisation framework can predict membership inference attack (MIA) vulnerability, offering a scalable alternative to costly shadow‑model attacks. Experiments on image and tabular classification tasks show that stable rank correlates positively with overall MIA success, while Log alpha‑Norm correlates negatively with MIA risk in low false‑positive regimes, outperforming conventional generalisation gap measures. These findings suggest that neural network spectra contain privacy leakage signals not captured by traditional overfitting metrics, pointing to spectral analysis as a promising direction for privacy auditing.
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.
The paper introduces a new privacy vulnerability in diffusion language models (DLMs) called token‑level memorization asymmetry, derived from theoretical analysis of diffusion training dynamics. It proposes Q‑Skew, a quantile‑weighted skewness indicator, to perform membership inference on fine‑tuned DLMs, outperforming existing baselines across multiple datasets and models. Additionally, Q‑Skew can be used to extract personally identifiable information (PII), demonstrating a broader privacy attack surface.
arXiv:2606. 10481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) can exhibit problematic memorization of individual training examples.
arXiv:2606. 17110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly trained on proprietary or sensitive data, from private healthcare and financial records to user conversations containing secrets.
Adaptive Diffusion Freezing (ADF) is a new privacy‑preserving framework for diffusion models that protects against membership inference attacks (MIAs). It uses cross‑timestep adaptive freezing training, where a mask matrix controls which data subsets participate at each diffusion timestep, reducing over‑memorization and aligning model behavior for member and non‑member samples. A pretraining‑based risk‑aware freezing policy estimates MIA risk and suppresses high‑risk subset‑timestep pairs, achieving a superior privacy‑utility‑efficiency trade‑off across multiple datasets.
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...
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).
arXiv:2607. 12354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we challenge the prevailing view that information dependency (including rote memorization) drives training data exposure to image reconstruction attacks.
arXiv:2511. 20710v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the age of agentic AI, the growing deployment of multi-modal models (MMs) has introduced new attack vectors that can leak sensitive training data in MMs, causing privacy leakage.
arXiv:2606. 28479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CSIRTs increasingly fine tune language models on vulnerability scan records, but these records expose internal network topology and create privacy risks under regulations such as GDPR and LGPD.