arXiv Machine Learning

SoK: Privacy Attacks on Machine Learning via Explainable AI

The paper surveys 25 studies that use explainable AI to compromise machine learning models, covering attacks such as model extraction, membership inference, and model inversion. It distinguishes between how explanations are obtained—through target releases, attacker-derived methods, secondary disclosure, privileged access, or global artifacts—and shows that explanations can lower extraction costs and reveal membership signals via statistics, recourse distance, and robustness. The authors compare threat models, signals, and defenses, concluding that no single explanation type is always unsafe and that protection must be tailored to the specific acquisition path and target asset.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Privacy Leakage on DNNs: A Survey of Model Inversion Attacks and Defenses

The paper "Privacy Leakage on DNNs: A Survey of Model Inversion Attacks and Defenses" provides a comprehensive review of model inversion (MI) attacks that exploit trained deep neural networks to reconstruct private training data. It traces the evolution of MI from early machine‑learning contexts to recent DNN‑based attacks across various modalities and learning tasks, offering a detailed taxonomy and comparative analysis of both attacks and defenses. The authors also present an open‑source toolbox on GitHub to support further research in this area.

By Hao Fang, Yixiang Qiu, Hongyao Yu, Wenbo Yu, Jiawei Kong, Baoli Chong, Bin Chen, Xuan Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, Ke Xu