arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Automated screening of privacy risks in medical AI

The paper introduces a lightweight screening tool that evaluates individual patient vulnerability to membership inference attacks across thousands of medical AI models. By measuring attack scores for each patient, the authors found that certain records consistently rank high in risk regardless of training settings, and that stronger weight decay can reduce overall exposure but not the identity of the most at‑risk patients. The tool uses four small models to flag high‑risk patients before a production model is trained, aiming to integrate privacy assessment into clinical AI data preparation.

By Konstantinos Vrettos, Eleftherios Tzanis, Haridimos Kondylakis, Evangelia E. Vassalou, Florence X. Doo, Michail E. Klontzas
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