@inproceedings{
wang2023mope,
title={MoPe: Model Perturbation-based Privacy Attacks on Language Models},
author={Jason Wang and Jeffrey Wang and Marvin Li and Seth Neel},
booktitle={Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research},
year={2023},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=zBbpEfbuTm}
}
Recent work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can unintentionally leak sensitive information present in their training data. In this paper, we present MoPe ($\textbf{Mo}$del $\textbf{Pe}$rturbations), a new method to identify with high confidence if a given text is in the training data of a pre-trained language model, given white-box access to the models parameters. MoPe adds noise to the model in parameter space and measures the drop in the log-likelihood for a given point $x$, a statistic we show approximates the trace of the Hessian matrix with respect to model parameters. We compare MoPe to existing state-of-the-art loss-based attacks and other attacks based on second-order curvature information (such as the trace of the Hessian with respect to the model input). Across language models ranging from size $70$M to $12$B parameters, we show that MoPe is more effective than existing attacks. We also find that the loss of a point alone is insufficient to determine extractability---there are training points we can recover using our methods that have average loss. This casts some doubt on prior work that uses the loss of a point as evidence of memorization or "unlearning."
MoPe: Model Perturbation-based Privacy Attacks on Language Models
Jason Wang Jeffrey Wang Marvin Li Seth Neel