Empirical Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks on NLP Text Classifiers: A Baseline Study on SST-2
Updated 1 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026
paper_01M294FQBXY7NBEHWTQVVSMJCK
- Published
- 11 Sept 2026
- T1 · 1 h ago
- arXiv
- 2609.10935
- T1 · 1 h ago
- Category
- cs.CR
- T1 · 1 h ago
Abstract
Membership inference attacks (MIAs) try to determine whether a specific record was used to train a model, a privacy risk that matters in natural language processing (NLP), where training data can contain sensitive user text. This paper presents a controlled benchmark of membership inference vulnerability for text classification on the GLUE SST-2 sentiment dataset. A TF-IDF + Logistic Regression pipeline and a fine-tuned DistilBERT classifier are compared under a loss-threshold MIA, with utility measured by development accuracy and macro F1. DistilBERT reached 0.9466 accuracy and 0.9460 macro F1 against 0.8756 and 0.8727 for Logistic Regression, yet both models leaked membership signal (Attack AUC 0.5615 and 0.5800, respectively). Two mitigations were tested. Stronger regularization reduced leakage for Logistic Regression at a visible utility cost, whereas fine-tuning DistilBERT for 2 epochs instead of 3 reduced leakage with negligible accuracy loss. Lightweight training adjustments can improve the privacy-utility trade-off without complex defenses.
Authors 2
William Novak (Minot State University), Muhammad Abusaqer (Minot State University)
Specification
- Official page
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
- Arxiv announce type
- cross
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
- arXiv id
- 2609.10935
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
- Categories
- cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
- Primary category
- cs.CR
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
- Published
- 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
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9
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T19
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1 h ago
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Official pageofficial_url1
| Value | Valid from → to | Status | Source | Confidence | Extractor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10935 | → current | current | arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1 | high | deterministic |
Abstractabstract1
| Value | Valid from → to | Status | Source | Confidence | Extractor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Membership inference attacks (MIAs) try to determine whether a specific record was used to train a model, a privacy risk that matters in natural language processing (NLP), where training data can contain sensitive user text. This paper presents a controlled benchmark of membership inference vulnerability for text classification on the GLUE SST-2 sentiment dataset. A TF-IDF + Logistic Regression pipeline and a fine-tuned DistilBERT classifier are compared under a loss-threshold MIA, with utility measured by development accuracy and macro F1. DistilBERT reached 0.9466 accuracy and 0.9460 macro F1 against 0.8756 and 0.8727 for Logistic Regression, yet both models leaked membership signal (Attack AUC 0.5615 and 0.5800, respectively). Two mitigations were tested. Stronger regularization reduced leakage for Logistic Regression at a visible utility cost, whereas fine-tuning DistilBERT for 2 epochs instead of 3 reduced leakage with negligible accuracy loss. Lightweight training adjustments can improve the privacy-utility trade-off without complex defenses. | → current | current | arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1 | high | deterministic |
Arxiv announce typearxiv_announce_type1
| Value | Valid from → to | Status | Source | Confidence | Extractor |
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| cross | → current | current | arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1 | high | deterministic |
arXiv idarxiv_id1
| Value | Valid from → to | Status | Source | Confidence | Extractor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2609.10935 | → current | current | arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1 | high | deterministic |
Categoriescategories1
| Value | Valid from → to | Status | Source | Confidence | Extractor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG | → current | current | arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1 | high | deterministic |
PDFpdf_url1
| Value | Valid from → to | Status | Source | Confidence | Extractor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10935 | → current | current | arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1 | high | deterministic |
Primary categoryprimary_category1
| Value | Valid from → to | Status | Source | Confidence | Extractor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cs.CR | → current | current | arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1 | high | deterministic |
Publishedpublished_at1
| Value | Valid from → to | Status | Source | Confidence | Extractor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Sept 2026 | → current | current | arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1 | high | deterministic |
Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →
- New paperPaperEmpirical Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks on NLP Text Classifiers: A Baseline Study on SST-2
New paper: Empirical Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks on NLP Text Classifiers: A Baseline Study on SST-2
arxiv
| Source | Document | Type | Tier | Last observed | Snapshots |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| arXiv (Atom API + RSS) | rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG | feed | T1· Official | 1 h ago | 1 |
Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.