Ensembling Membership Inference Attacks Against Tabular Generative Models
On the map: LLM safety and security → Membership inference attacks
Abstract (arXiv)
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.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Membership inference attacks, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 24 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2025.
Builds on
24 of 48 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2023Membership Inference Attacks against Synthetic Data through Overfitting Detection24 Feb
- 2022Quantifying Privacy Risks of Masked Language Models Using Membership Inference Attacks8 Mar
- 2021Membership Inference Attacks From First Principles7 Dec
Other references · 21
- 2019Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GANcited by 699
- 2019Neural Spline Flowscited by 596
- 2022TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Modelscited by 377
- 2022Language Models are Realistic Tabular Data Generatorscited by 294
- 2019White-box vs Black-box: Bayes Optimal Strategies for Membership Inferencecited by 271
- 2020Auditing Differentially Private Machine Learning: How Private is Private SGD?cited by 218
- 2023Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent Spacecited by 186
- 2017OpenML Benchmarking Suitescited by 178
- 2019Reconstruction and Membership Inference Attacks against Generative Modelscited by 122
- 2023REaLTabFormer: Generating Realistic Relational and Tabular Data using Transformerscited by 94
- 2022Diffusion models for missing value imputation in tabular datacited by 77
- 2023Synthcity: facilitating innovative use cases of synthetic data in different data modalitiescited by 76
9 more
- 2022TAPAS: a Toolbox for Adversarial Privacy Auditing of Synthetic Datacited by 57
- 2022Adversarial random forests for density estimation and generative modelingcited by 44
- 2023AutoDiff: combining Auto-encoder and Diffusion model for tabular data synthesizingcited by 24
- 2024Scaling While Privacy Preserving: A Comprehensive Synthetic Tabular Data Generation and Evaluation in Learning Analyticscited by 19
- 2024Can I trust my fake data -- A comprehensive quality assessment framework for synthetic tabular data in healthcarecited by 17
- 2024Self-Supervision Improves Diffusion Models for Tabular Data Imputationcited by 16
- 2024Tabular Data Augmentation for Machine Learning: Progress and Prospects of Embracing Generative AIcited by 15
- 2024Data Plagiarism Index: Characterizing the Privacy Risk of Data-Copying in Tabular Generative Modelscited by 12
- 2024Error Diversity Matters: An Error-Resistant Ensemble Method for Unsupervised Dependency Parsingcited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026RAPID: Risk of Attribute Prediction-Induced Disclosure in Synthetic Microdatacited by 0
- 2026On Privacy in Data-Space Tabular Diffusion Models: Influential Factors, Attacker Knowledge, and Metricscited by 0
- 2026FERMI: Exploiting Relations for Membership Inference Against Tabular Diffusion Modelscited by 0
- 2026Quantifying the Privacy of Counterfactuals by Leveraging Membership Inference Attacks Against Synthetic Datacited by 0
- 2026Quantifying the Privacy of Counterfactuals by Leveraging Membership Inference Attacks Against Synthetic Data4 Jun 2026
- 2026FERMI: Exploiting Relations for Membership Inference Against Tabular Diffusion Models12 May 2026
- 2026On Privacy in Data-Space Tabular Diffusion Models: Influential Factors, Attacker Knowledge, and Metrics7 May 2026
- 2026RAPID: Risk of Attribute Prediction-Induced Disclosure in Synthetic Microdata9 Feb 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025Synth-MIA: A Testbed for Auditing Privacy Leakage in Tabular Data Synthesis
- 2025Privacy Auditing Synthetic Data Release through Local Likelihood Attacks
- 2024Lost in the Averages: A New Specific Setup to Evaluate Membership Inference Attacks Against Machine Learning Models
- 2026SoK: Rethinking Membership Inference in Tabular Machine Learning
- 2026Finding Connections: Membership Inference Attacks for the Multi-Table Synthetic Data Setting
- 2025Membership Inference over Diffusion-models-based Synthetic Tabular Data
- 2025Understanding the Impact of Data Domain Extraction on Synthetic Data Privacy
- 2025When Privacy Isn't Synthetic: Hidden Data Leakage in Generative AI Models