arXiv Machine Learning

Memorisation bias in medical AI

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Clinically Grounded Privacy Evaluation of Medical LMs

The paper introduces a clinically grounded privacy evaluation framework for medical language models, assessing leakage across a spectrum of adversarial access levels—from publicly inferable demographics to leaked note fragments. Using this framework on an LM pretrained on 378,000 clinical notes, the authors find that routine encounter metadata leads to high verbatim memorization and significant recovery of sensitive diagnoses (e.g., AUROC 0.91 for abortion, 0.82 for HIV). They also note that exact-match memorization can overstate disclosure, with 36% of memorized tokens being templated documentation, underscoring the risks of training on longitudinal clinical data and offering a reusable evaluation tool.

By Sasha Ronaghi, Sana Tonekaboni, Lena Stempfle, Vivian Utti, Jordan Li Cahoon, Nathaniel Hendrix, Ayin Vala, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Emily Alsentzer
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Memorization in Large Language Models in Medicine: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Implications

arXiv:2509. 08604v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medicine, with many studies adapting them through continued pre-training or fine-tuning on medical data to enhance domain-specific accuracy and safety.

By Anran Li, Lingfei Qian, Mengmeng Du, Yu Yin, Yan Hu, Zihao Sun, Yihang Fu, Hyunjae Kim, Erica Stutz, Xuguang Ai, Qianqian Xie, Rui Zhu, Jimin Huang, Yifan Yang, Siru Liu, Yih-Chung Tham, Lucila Ohno-Machado, Hyunghoon Cho, Zhiyong Lu, Hua Xu, Qingyu Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

SoK: Reconstruction Attacks on Synthetic Tabular Data (Insights from Winning the NIST CRC)

arXiv:2606. 08372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic data is increasingly promoted as a privacy-preserving substitute for releasing sensitive tabular records, yet its central adversarial threat ("reconstruction", the recovery of an individual's hidden attribute values from a synthetic release and a handful of known quasi-identifiers) has been studied only in scattered, hard-to-compare settings.

By Steven Golob, Sikha Pentyala, Martine De Cock
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Private and interpretable clinical prediction with quantum-inspired tensor train models

The paper demonstrates that publicly available clinical machine learning models, such as logistic regression (LR), pose significant privacy risks because attackers can recover model parameters and identify training cohorts through various membership inference attacks. The authors show that even small cohorts can be reliably identified and that common practices like cross-validation can worsen the risk. To mitigate this, they propose a quantum-inspired defense that tensorizes discretized models into tensor trains (TTs), which obfuscates parameters, preserves accuracy, and maintains interpretability while providing black‑box protection comparable to Differential Privacy.

By Jos\'e Ram\'on Pareja Monturiol, Juliette Sinnott, Roger G. Melko, Mohammad Kohandel
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

CARE: Privacy-Compliant Agentic Reasoning with Evidence Discordance

The paper introduces MIMIC-DOS, a dataset derived from MIMIC-IV that focuses on ICU cases where patient symptoms and medical signs are discordant. It presents CARE, a privacy‑compliant multi‑stage agentic reasoning framework that uses a proprietary LLM to generate structured categories and transitions, while a local LLM performs evidence acquisition and decision‑making. In retrospective evaluations on MIMIC‑DOS, CARE outperforms other LLMs and agentic workflows, demonstrating stronger handling of conflicting clinical evidence while preserving patient privacy.

By Haochen Liu, Weien Li, Rui Song, Zeyu Li, Chun Jason Xue, Xiao-Yang Liu, Sam Nallaperuma-Herzberg, Xue Liu, Ye Yuan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Causal Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks

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.

By Mathieu Even, Cl\'ement Berenfeld, Linus Bleistein, Tudor Cebere, Julie Josse, Aur\'elien Bellet
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Profiling Privacy Preservation Against Gradient Inversion Attacks in Tabular Federated Learning

arXiv:2606. 00986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple data holders to train machine learning models collaboratively without centralizing raw data, making it useful in privacy sensitive domains such as healthcare and institutional data sharing.

By Ivo Osterberg Nilsson, Maximilian Birr Engvall, Viktor Valadi, Teddy Lazebnik