Practical Membership Inference Attacks against Fine-tuned Large Language Models via Self-prompt Calibration

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fu, Wenjie, Wang, Huandong, Gao, Chen, Liu, Guanghua, Li, Yong, Jiang, Tao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917848084905984
author Fu, Wenjie
Wang, Huandong
Gao, Chen
Liu, Guanghua
Li, Yong
Jiang, Tao
author_facet Fu, Wenjie
Wang, Huandong
Gao, Chen
Liu, Guanghua
Li, Yong
Jiang, Tao
contents Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) aim to infer whether a target data record has been utilized for model training or not. Existing MIAs designed for large language models (LLMs) can be bifurcated into two types: reference-free and reference-based attacks. Although reference-based attacks appear promising performance by calibrating the probability measured on the target model with reference models, this illusion of privacy risk heavily depends on a reference dataset that closely resembles the training set. Both two types of attacks are predicated on the hypothesis that training records consistently maintain a higher probability of being sampled. However, this hypothesis heavily relies on the overfitting of target models, which will be mitigated by multiple regularization methods and the generalization of LLMs. Thus, these reasons lead to high false-positive rates of MIAs in practical scenarios. We propose a Membership Inference Attack based on Self-calibrated Probabilistic Variation (SPV-MIA). Specifically, we introduce a self-prompt approach, which constructs the dataset to fine-tune the reference model by prompting the target LLM itself. In this manner, the adversary can collect a dataset with a similar distribution from public APIs. Furthermore, we introduce probabilistic variation, a more reliable membership signal based on LLM memorization rather than overfitting, from which we rediscover the neighbour attack with theoretical grounding. Comprehensive evaluation conducted on three datasets and four exemplary LLMs shows that SPV-MIA raises the AUC of MIAs from 0.7 to a significantly high level of 0.9. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/NeurIPS2024_SPV-MIA
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_06062
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Practical Membership Inference Attacks against Fine-tuned Large Language Models via Self-prompt Calibration
Fu, Wenjie
Wang, Huandong
Gao, Chen
Liu, Guanghua
Li, Yong
Jiang, Tao
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) aim to infer whether a target data record has been utilized for model training or not. Existing MIAs designed for large language models (LLMs) can be bifurcated into two types: reference-free and reference-based attacks. Although reference-based attacks appear promising performance by calibrating the probability measured on the target model with reference models, this illusion of privacy risk heavily depends on a reference dataset that closely resembles the training set. Both two types of attacks are predicated on the hypothesis that training records consistently maintain a higher probability of being sampled. However, this hypothesis heavily relies on the overfitting of target models, which will be mitigated by multiple regularization methods and the generalization of LLMs. Thus, these reasons lead to high false-positive rates of MIAs in practical scenarios. We propose a Membership Inference Attack based on Self-calibrated Probabilistic Variation (SPV-MIA). Specifically, we introduce a self-prompt approach, which constructs the dataset to fine-tune the reference model by prompting the target LLM itself. In this manner, the adversary can collect a dataset with a similar distribution from public APIs. Furthermore, we introduce probabilistic variation, a more reliable membership signal based on LLM memorization rather than overfitting, from which we rediscover the neighbour attack with theoretical grounding. Comprehensive evaluation conducted on three datasets and four exemplary LLMs shows that SPV-MIA raises the AUC of MIAs from 0.7 to a significantly high level of 0.9. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/NeurIPS2024_SPV-MIA
title Practical Membership Inference Attacks against Fine-tuned Large Language Models via Self-prompt Calibration
topic Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06062