{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/190600389","title":"Disparate Vulnerability to Membership Inference Attacks","arxiv_id":"1906.00389","date":"2019-06-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Bogdan Kulynych","Mohammad Yaghini","Giovanni Cherubin","Michael Veale","Carmela Troncoso"],"abstract":"A membership inference attack (MIA) against a machine-learning model enables an attacker to determine whether a given data record was part of the model's training data or not. In this paper, we provide an in-depth study of the phenomenon of disparate vulnerability against MIAs: unequal success rate of MIAs against different population subgroups. We first establish necessary and sufficient conditions for MIAs to be prevented, both on average and for population subgroups, using a notion of distributional generalization. Second, we derive connections of disparate vulnerability to algorithmic fairness and to differential privacy. We show that fairness can only prevent disparate vulnerability against limited classes of adversaries. Differential privacy bounds disparate vulnerability but can significantly reduce the accuracy of the model. We show that estimating disparate vulnerability to MIAs by na\\\"ively applying existing attacks can lead to overestimation. We then establish which attacks are suitable for estimating disparate vulnerability, and provide a statistical framework for doing so reliably. We conduct experiments on synthetic and real-world data finding statistically significant evidence of disparate vulnerability in realistic settings. The code is available at https://github.com/spring-epfl/disparate-vulnerability","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.00389v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.00389v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"190600389","repo_url":"https://github.com/spring-epfl/disparate-vulnerability","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"190600389","repo_url":"https://github.com/SJabin/Data_Model_Dependencies_MIA","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-learning","task_name":"BIG-bench Machine Learning"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"},{"task_slug":"inference-attack","task_name":"Inference Attack"},{"task_slug":"membership-inference-attack","task_name":"Membership Inference Attack"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1906.00389","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1906.00389"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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