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Ensembling Membership Inference Attacks Against Tabular Generative Models

Published: September 2, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2509.05350v1

By: Joshua Ward , Yuxuan Yang , Chi-Hua Wang and more

Potential Business Impact:

Finds if fake data reveals real secrets.

Business Areas:
Predictive Analytics Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) have emerged as a principled framework for auditing the privacy of synthetic data generated by tabular generative models, where many diverse methods have been proposed that each exploit different privacy leakage signals. However, in realistic threat scenarios, an adversary must choose a single method without a priori guarantee that it will be the empirically highest performing option. We study this challenge as a decision theoretic problem under uncertainty and conduct the largest synthetic data privacy benchmark to date. Here, we find that no MIA constitutes a strictly dominant strategy across a wide variety of model architectures and dataset domains under our threat model. Motivated by these findings, we propose ensemble MIAs and show that unsupervised ensembles built on individual attacks offer empirically more robust, regret-minimizing strategies than individual attacks.

Country of Origin
πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ United States

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
12 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Cryptography and Security