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Main Authors: Zhao, Chenxu, Qian, Wei, Chen, Aobo, Huai, Mengdi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07066
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author Zhao, Chenxu
Qian, Wei
Chen, Aobo
Huai, Mengdi
author_facet Zhao, Chenxu
Qian, Wei
Chen, Aobo
Huai, Mengdi
contents Recent studies have shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to infer whether a data record was used to train a target model or not. To analyze and study these vulnerabilities, various MIA methods have been proposed. Despite the significance and popularity of MIAs, existing works on MIAs are limited in providing guarantees on the false discovery rate (FDR), which refers to the expected proportion of false discoveries among the identified positive discoveries. However, it is very challenging to ensure the false discovery rate guarantees, because the underlying distribution is usually unknown, and the estimated non-member probabilities often exhibit interdependence. To tackle the above challenges, in this paper, we design a novel membership inference attack method, which can provide the guarantees on the false discovery rate. Additionally, we show that our method can also provide the marginal probability guarantee on labeling true non-member data as member data. Notably, our method can work as a wrapper that can be seamlessly integrated with existing MIA methods in a post-hoc manner, while also providing the FDR control. We perform the theoretical analysis for our method. Extensive experiments in various settings (e.g., the black-box setting and the lifelong learning setting) are also conducted to verify the desirable performance of our method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07066
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Membership Inference Attacks with False Discovery Rate Control
Zhao, Chenxu
Qian, Wei
Chen, Aobo
Huai, Mengdi
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent studies have shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to infer whether a data record was used to train a target model or not. To analyze and study these vulnerabilities, various MIA methods have been proposed. Despite the significance and popularity of MIAs, existing works on MIAs are limited in providing guarantees on the false discovery rate (FDR), which refers to the expected proportion of false discoveries among the identified positive discoveries. However, it is very challenging to ensure the false discovery rate guarantees, because the underlying distribution is usually unknown, and the estimated non-member probabilities often exhibit interdependence. To tackle the above challenges, in this paper, we design a novel membership inference attack method, which can provide the guarantees on the false discovery rate. Additionally, we show that our method can also provide the marginal probability guarantee on labeling true non-member data as member data. Notably, our method can work as a wrapper that can be seamlessly integrated with existing MIA methods in a post-hoc manner, while also providing the FDR control. We perform the theoretical analysis for our method. Extensive experiments in various settings (e.g., the black-box setting and the lifelong learning setting) are also conducted to verify the desirable performance of our method.
title Membership Inference Attacks with False Discovery Rate Control
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07066