On the MIA Vulnerability Gap Between Private GANs and Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sebag, Ilana, Franceschi, Jean-Yves, Rakotomamonjy, Alain, Allauzen, Alexandre, Atif, Jamal
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Sebag, Ilana
Franceschi, Jean-Yves
Rakotomamonjy, Alain
Allauzen, Alexandre
Atif, Jamal
author_facet Sebag, Ilana
Franceschi, Jean-Yves
Rakotomamonjy, Alain
Allauzen, Alexandre
Atif, Jamal
contents Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models have emerged as leading approaches for high-quality image synthesis. While both can be trained under differential privacy (DP) to protect sensitive data, their sensitivity to membership inference attacks (MIAs), a key threat to data confidentiality, remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first unified theoretical and empirical analysis of the privacy risks faced by differentially private generative models. We begin by showing, through a stability-based analysis, that GANs exhibit fundamentally lower sensitivity to data perturbations than diffusion models, suggesting a structural advantage in resisting MIAs. We then validate this insight with a comprehensive empirical study using a standardized MIA pipeline to evaluate privacy leakage across datasets and privacy budgets. Our results consistently reveal a marked privacy robustness gap in favor of GANs, even in strong DP regimes, highlighting that model type alone can critically shape privacy leakage.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_03341
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the MIA Vulnerability Gap Between Private GANs and Diffusion Models
Sebag, Ilana
Franceschi, Jean-Yves
Rakotomamonjy, Alain
Allauzen, Alexandre
Atif, Jamal
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models have emerged as leading approaches for high-quality image synthesis. While both can be trained under differential privacy (DP) to protect sensitive data, their sensitivity to membership inference attacks (MIAs), a key threat to data confidentiality, remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first unified theoretical and empirical analysis of the privacy risks faced by differentially private generative models. We begin by showing, through a stability-based analysis, that GANs exhibit fundamentally lower sensitivity to data perturbations than diffusion models, suggesting a structural advantage in resisting MIAs. We then validate this insight with a comprehensive empirical study using a standardized MIA pipeline to evaluate privacy leakage across datasets and privacy budgets. Our results consistently reveal a marked privacy robustness gap in favor of GANs, even in strong DP regimes, highlighting that model type alone can critically shape privacy leakage.
title On the MIA Vulnerability Gap Between Private GANs and Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03341