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.
By Liou Tang, James Joshi, Ashish Kundu
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...
By Saloni Modi, Srivi Balaji, Yusong Zhu, Gautam Kamath, Kevin Tian
arXiv:2608. 04365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Audits have emerged as a critical instrument for algorithmic governance, providing a mechanism for external scrutiny and governance of machine learning models.
By Augustin Godinot, Sofiane Azogagh, Julien Ferry, S\'ebastien Gambs
Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge.
The paper investigates black-box privacy auditing for differentially private learning algorithms, focusing on DP‑SGD. It introduces a method that optimizes the auditor’s canary set using metagradient descent, improving empirical lower bounds on privacy parameters compared to prior canary designs. The approach is shown to be DP‑SGD agnostic and efficient, with optimized canaries for small models remaining effective for larger DP‑SGD models.
By Matteo Boglioni, Terrance Liu, Andrew Ilyas, Zhiwei Steven Wu
arXiv:2606. 16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements.
By Dayong Ye, Tianqing Zhu, Ruiding Huang, Xinbo Fu, Jiayang Li, Bo Liu, Huan Huo, Wanlei Zhou
arXiv:2607. 21839v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Privacy-preserving machine learning auditing protocols allow auditors to assess models for properties such as accuracy or fairness, without revealing their internals or training data.
By Carter Luck, Olive Franzese-McLaughlin, Elisaweta Masserova, Akira Takahashi, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Nicolas Papernot
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.
By Kareem Amin, Rudrajit Das, Alessandro Epasto, Adel Javanmard, Dennis Kraft, M\'onica Ribero, Sergei Vassilvitskii
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.
By Adya Agrawal, Yu Wei, Jaspal Singh, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Vassilis Zikas
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.
By Kareem Amin, Rudrajit Das, Alessandro Epasto, Adel Javanmard, Dennis Kraft, M\'onica Ribero, Sergei Vassilvitskii
arXiv:2606. 10481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) can exhibit problematic memorization of individual training examples.
By Nicole Mitchell, Galen Andrew, Arun Ganesh, Brendan McMahan, Peter Kairouz
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.
By Mathieu Dagr\'eou, Aur\'elien Bellet