WARP: Weight-Space Analysis for Recovering Training Data Portfolios
On the map: LLM safety and security → Machine unlearning
Abstract (arXiv)
Foundation models are routinely released to the public, yet the data recipes used to train them -- such as domain mixture weights that determine how different sources are sampled -- are rarely disclosed. This creates an access asymmetry: researchers study the resulting models but lack visibility into the training distribution that produces them. Prior works for inferring training data, such as membership inference, detect at the level of individual samples and thus cannot characterize the global composition of the training corpus. We introduce WARP, a framework that recovers a fine-tuned model's training mixtures directly from its released weights. WARP interpolates between the base and fine-tuned models using model merging, generating pseudo-checkpoints that approximate the missing training trajectory and expose a geometric footprint of the training data in the weight space. From these simulated footprints, WARP extracts geometric features and maps them to domain proportions using either a parameter-free softmax readout or an MLP projector trained on synthetic mixtures. In controlled experiments with BERT and GPT-2, WARP recovers domain mixtures with an average MAE as low as 0.046 and 0.104 respectively, outperforming membership inference and a variant with access to the true training trajectory.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Machine unlearning, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 32 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2026.
Builds on
32 of 37 references.
References · 32
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20 more
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- 2024Do Membership Inference Attacks Work on Large Language Models?cited by 188
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
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