English

Training data membership inference via Gaussian process meta-modeling: a post-hoc analysis approach

Machine Learning 2025-10-28 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) test whether a data point was part of a model's training set, posing serious privacy risks. Existing methods often depend on shadow models or heavy query access, which limits their practicality. We propose GP-MIA, an efficient and interpretable approach based on Gaussian process (GP) meta-modeling. Using post-hoc metrics such as accuracy, entropy, dataset statistics, and optional sensitivity features (e.g. gradients, NTK measures) from a single trained model, GP-MIA trains a GP classifier to distinguish members from non-members while providing calibrated uncertainty estimates. Experiments on synthetic data, real-world fraud detection data, CIFAR-10, and WikiText-2 show that GP-MIA achieves high accuracy and generalizability, offering a practical alternative to existing MIAs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.21846,
  title  = {Training data membership inference via Gaussian process meta-modeling: a post-hoc analysis approach},
  author = {Yongchao Huang and Pengfei Zhang and Shahzad Mumtaz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.21846},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:04:42.611Z