arXiv:2606.26021cs.CRcs.AI2026-06

Transformer注意力层会泄露隐私,导致成员推理攻击成功率提升7.7%。

Privacy Vulnerabilities of Attention Layers in Tabular Foundation Models and Protection of High-Risk Queries

论文配图:Privacy Vulnerabilities of Attention Layers in Tabular Foundation Models and Protection of High-Risk Queries
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 提出AMIA攻击,无需影子模型即可利用注意力集中模式发起成员推理。
  • 注意力机制泄露的成员信号比传统置信度攻击强,低误报率下平均提升7.7%。
  • 基于k-匿名设计推理时防御,仅保护高风险查询,隐私泄露降低50%。

表格基础模型常被认为隐私风险较低,因其预训练数据多为合成数据。然而,这些模型依赖上下文学习,在推理时可能直接输入敏感记录作为标注上下文。本文揭示,通过注意力机制生成的预测会泄露足够信息,使成员推理攻击(MIA)更有效。为此,我们提出AMIA(基于注意力的成员推理攻击),一种无需影子模型的攻击方法,利用Transformer注意力模式的集中特性。实验表明,注意力机制揭示了强成员信号,其表现优于传统置信度攻击,平均提升7.7%,尤其在低误报率场景下显著。为缓解风险,我们引入一种基于k-匿名原理的推理时防御策略,通过降低上下文键表示的独特性来减少隐私泄露,不添加随机噪声或重训模型。该方法仅对AMIA得分高的高风险查询进行干预,平均降低50%的成员泄露,对置信度攻击降低25%,同时仅造成3.9%性能下降。此外,我们发现微调会引入额外隐私风险:微调后预测置信度上升的样本更易受攻击,说明微调可能放大记忆效应并暴露敏感训练信息。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Tabular foundation models are commonly assumed to present limited privacy concerns as they are often pre-trained on large collections of synthetic data. However, these models leverage in-context learning, where sensitive records may be provided directly at inference time as labelled context examples. In this paper, we demonstrate that predictions generated via the attention mechanism leak sufficient information to enable effective Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs). To highlight this vulnerability, we propose AMIA (Attention-based Membership Inference Attack), a shadow-model-free attack that exploits the concentration of transformer attention patterns. Our results show that attention mechanisms reveal strong membership signals, which exceed classical confidence-based attacks, achieving an average gain of 7.7\%, specially in low false-positive regimes. To mitigate this risk, we introduce an inference-time defence inspired by $k$-anonymity principles. This approach reduces the uniqueness of context-key representations without introducing random noise or retraining the model. By targeting only high-risk queries identified through AMIA scores, the defence substantially reduces membership leakage of this attack by an average of 50\% and 25\% against confidence-based attacks, while preserving predictive utility with only 3.9\% performance degradation. Beyond showing that context examples are vulnerable, we further demonstrate that fine-tuning introduces an additional source of privacy risk. In particular, samples whose prediction confidence increases after fine-tuning become more susceptible to MIAs, indicating that fine-tuning can amplify memorisation and expose sensitive training information through confidence shifts.

隐私安全注意力机制成员推理表格模型

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