English

Semantic Membership Inference Attack against Large Language Models

Machine Learning 2024-06-17 v1

Abstract

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) determine whether a specific data point was included in the training set of a target model. In this paper, we introduce the Semantic Membership Inference Attack (SMIA), a novel approach that enhances MIA performance by leveraging the semantic content of inputs and their perturbations. SMIA trains a neural network to analyze the target model's behavior on perturbed inputs, effectively capturing variations in output probability distributions between members and non-members. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on the Pythia and GPT-Neo model families using the Wikipedia dataset. Our results show that SMIA significantly outperforms existing MIAs; for instance, SMIA achieves an AUC-ROC of 67.39% on Pythia-12B, compared to 58.90% by the second-best attack.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.10218,
  title  = {Semantic Membership Inference Attack against Large Language Models},
  author = {Hamid Mozaffari and Virendra J. Marathe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.10218},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:06:30.060Z