aiqbench analysis
This research demonstrates that Large Language Models can effectively distinguish synthetic tabular data from real datasets, offering a practical tool for privacy auditing where traditional statistical tests or human inspection fail. The study highlights significant performance variations between open-source and proprietary models, indicating that model selection and metadata encoding are critical factors in deploying LLMs for data governance. For practitioners, this method provides a scalable signal to validate the integrity of shared synthetic data without relying solely on distributional baselines.
LLM-as-a-Discriminator: When Synthetic Tables Still Look Real
arXiv:2606.09865v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privacy and data sharing are often in tension. Many organizations use synthetic data to reduce privacy risk and still share useful data. For tabular data, auditing privacy remains hard. In many cases, even humans cannot easily tell if a table is real or synthetic. In this paper, we propose a method based on LLM discrimination. We ask an LLM to classify each table sample as REAL or SYNTHETIC. We test two settings: C1 with table only, and C2 with table plus distributional metadata. We use LLaMA as an open model and Gemini as a reference model. In our experiments, we run three synthesis models, CTGAN, TVAE, and Gaussian Copula, on two public datasets, UCI Adult and ACS Census. We collect 451 valid trials. Our results show clear differences between models. On Adult, LLaMA reaches DRS=0% in reported cells, while Gemini reaches DRS=100% for CTGAN and TVAE. On Census, LLaMA predicts SYNTHETIC for most samples, while Gemini stays high in C1 but drops for CTGAN and TVAE in C2. We also compare with a classifier two-sample test (C2ST) and record linkage as distributional baselines, and with a human pilot of 2 annotators and 240 trials. Our results show that LLM discrimination is a practical privacy audit signal when model choice, per provider reporting, and data encoding are handled with care. For reproducibility, code and experiment scripts are available at https://github.com/SlokomManel/LLM-as-a-Discriminator.
Abstract:Privacy and data sharing are often in tension. Many organizations use synthetic data to reduce privacy risk and still share useful data. For tabular data, auditing privacy remains hard. In many cases, even humans cannot easily tell if a table is real or synthetic. In this paper, we propose a method based on LLM discrimination. We ask an LLM to classify each table sample as REAL or SYNTHETIC. We test two settings: C1 with table only, and C2 with table plus distributional metadata. We use LLaMA as an open model and Gemini as a reference model. In our experiments, we run three synthesis models, CTGAN, TVAE, and Gaussian Copula, on two public datasets, UCI Adult and ACS Census. We collect 451 valid trials. Our results show clear differences between models. On Adult, LLaMA reaches DRS=0% in reported cells, while Gemini reaches DRS=100% for CTGAN and TVAE. On Census, LLaMA predicts SYNTHETIC for most samples, while Gemini stays high in C1 but drops for CTGAN and TVAE in C2. We also compare with a classifier two-sample test (C2ST) and record linkage as distributional baselines, and with a human pilot of 2 annotators and 240 trials. Our results show that LLM discrimination is a practical privacy audit signal when model choice, per provider reporting, and data encoding are handled with care. For reproducibility, code and experiment scripts are available at this https URL.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
arXiv:2606.09865 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2606.09865v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.09865 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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