English

Noisy Neighbors: Efficient membership inference attacks against LLMs

Cryptography and Security 2024-06-25 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

The potential of transformer-based LLMs risks being hindered by privacy concerns due to their reliance on extensive datasets, possibly including sensitive information. Regulatory measures like GDPR and CCPA call for using robust auditing tools to address potential privacy issues, with Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) being the primary method for assessing LLMs' privacy risks. Differently from traditional MIA approaches, often requiring computationally intensive training of additional models, this paper introduces an efficient methodology that generates \textit{noisy neighbors} for a target sample by adding stochastic noise in the embedding space, requiring operating the target model in inference mode only. Our findings demonstrate that this approach closely matches the effectiveness of employing shadow models, showing its usability in practical privacy auditing scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.16565,
  title  = {Noisy Neighbors: Efficient membership inference attacks against LLMs},
  author = {Filippo Galli and Luca Melis and Tommaso Cucinotta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.16565},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:17:11.071Z