arXiv Machine Learning By Alexander Nemecek, Wenbiao Li, Xiaoqian Jiang, Jaideep Vaidya, Erman Ayday

Quantifying Memorization and Privacy Risks in Genomic Language Models

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The paper introduces a comprehensive privacy evaluation framework for genomic language models (GLMs) that quantifies memorization risks using perplexity-based detection, canary sequence extraction, and membership inference. By planting canary sequences at different repetition rates in synthetic and real datasets, the authors systematically assess how repetition, model capacity, and training dynamics affect memorization across various GLM architectures. The study demonstrates that GLMs do memorize training data to varying degrees and that no single attack method fully captures this risk, highlighting the necessity of multi-vector privacy auditing for genomic AI systems.

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