Transfer learning has become an increasingly popular technique in machine learning as a way to leverage a pretrained model trained for one task to assist with building a finetuned model for a related task. This paradigm has been especially popular for privacy in machine learning, where the pretrained model is considered public, and only the data for finetuning is considered sensitive. However, there are reasons to believe that the data used for pretraining is still sensitive, making it essential to understand how much information the finetuned model leaks about the pretraining data. In this work we propose a new membership-inference threat model where the adversary only has access to the finetuned model and would like to infer the membership of the pretraining data. To realize this threat model, we implement a novel metaclassifier-based attack, TMI, that leverages the influence of memorized pretraining samples on predictions in the downstream task. We evaluate TMI on both vision and natural language tasks across multiple transfer learning settings, including finetuning with differential privacy. Through our evaluation, we find that TMI can successfully infer membership of pretraining examples using query access to the finetuned model.

Property inference attacks allow an adversary to extract global properties of the training dataset from a machine learning model. Such attacks have privacy implications for data owners sharing their datasets to train machine learning models. Several existing approaches for property inference attacks against deep neural networks have been proposed [1] –[3], but they all rely on the attacker training a large number of shadow models, which induces a large computational overhead.In this paper, we consider the setting of property inference attacks in which the attacker can poison a subset of the training dataset and query the trained target model. Motivated by our theoretical analysis of model confidences under poisoning, we design an efficient property inference attack, SNAP, which obtains higher attack success and requires lower amounts of poisoning than the state-of-the-art poisoning-based property inference attack by Mahloujifar et al. [3]. For example, on the Census dataset, SNAP achieves 34% higher success rate than [3] while being 56.5× faster. We also extend our attack to infer whether a certain property was present at all during training and estimate the exact proportion of a property of interest efficiently. We evaluate our attack on several properties of varying proportions from four datasets and demonstrate SNAP’s generality and effectiveness.