On Privacy in Data-Space Tabular Diffusion Models: Influential Factors, Attacker Knowledge, and Metrics

Abstract:Tabular data plays an important role in many fields and industries, including those with elevated privacy considerations and risks. As such, there is a rising interest in generating high-quality synthetic proxies for real tabular data as a means of reducing privacy risk and proprietary data exposure. With data-space tabular diffusion models (TDMs) demonstrating leading performance in synthesizing such data, understanding and measuring the privacy risks associated with these models is imperative. Leveraging state-of-the-art membership inference attacks for such TDMs in both black- and white-box settings, this work quantifies the impact of training setup, synthesis choices, and attacker knowledge on privacy leakage. Moreover, the results demonstrate that adversaries need not have perfect knowledge of the training setup, identical data distributions, or massive compute resources to construct successful attacks. Finally, the substantial pitfalls associated with heuristic privacy metrics, such as distance-to-closest record, are identified.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2605.06835 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2605.06835v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.06835 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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