Leak It: Per-Document Extraction Beyond Aggregate Membership Inference
Victor Maricato
cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.CR
Submitted: 2026-08-10
Updated: 2026-08-12
Comments: 14 pages, 7 figures. Code: https://github.com/victormaricato/leakit
Code: https://github.com/victormaricato/leakit
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Membership inference (MIA) on language models is usually summarised by aggregate ROC-AUC, but such evaluations are confounded: model-free blind baselines can separate members from non-members using
Terminology
Abstract
Membership inference (MIA) on language models is usually summarised by aggregate ROC-AUC, but such evaluations are confounded: model-free blind baselines can separate members from non-members using surface text alone. Building on probabilistic discoverable extraction, we study black-box training-data leakage using N samples from p theta(. x), placing mean overlap, extreme-value overlap, and self-concentration on a common functional-estimation footing. On WikiMIA, a blind bag-of-words classifier reaches AUC 0.97 (TPR 0.90 at 5% FPR) while sampling adds nothing. On an IID Pile split (MIMIR), neither self-concentration nor gold-continuation recovery significantly exceeds a blind baseline in aggregate. Aggregate metrics hide the real harm: sampling verbatim-extracts training data for a tail of documents no blind attack can reach. On Pythia-6.9B, 16.6% of 500 Pile documents bearing a real identifier (83 documents; 21.3% of those bearing an email address) have that identifier reproduced and not reproduced under a mismatched-prefix control. Each leak is attributable to that document rather than a globally common string. This per-document disclosure is invisible to aggregate AUC. Risk is uneven: identifier leakage is about 3x stronger in code than prose, though prose remains positive and grows with capacity (4.0% to 12.1% from 410M to 6.9B); recovery of arbitrary held-out continuations is essentially confined to code (+0.44 member gap on GitHub vs at most +0.014 on prose). Temperature and nucleus sampling have minor effect, a 16-token prefix suffices, and the sample-budget relationship corroborates prior probabilistic-extraction results. We detect no reduction from deduplication. Privacy audits should report per-document extraction, not only aggregate membership, and motivate differential privacy as the mitigation. We release leakit, a black-box tool implementing this probe and its control.
Sources
- Blind Baselines Beat Membership Inference Attacks for Foundation Models
- Extracting memorized pieces of (copyrighted) books from open-weight language models
- Measuring memorization in language models via probabilistic extraction
- Exploring the limits of strong membership inference attacks on large language models
- Sampling-based Pseudo-Likelihood for Membership Inference Attacks
- Emergent and Predictable Memorization in Large Language Models
- Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better
- Analyzing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information in Language Models
- Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models
- AttenMIA: LLM Membership Inference Attack through Attention Signals
- Towards Label-Only Membership Inference Attack against Pre-trained Large Language Models
- Practical Membership Inference Attacks against Fine-tuned Large Language Models via Self-prompt Calibration
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