Efficient Membership Inference Attacks by Bayesian Neural Network

Abstract: Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) aim to estimate whether a specific data point was used in the training of a given model. Previous attacks often utilize multiple reference models to approximate the conditional score distribution, leading to significant computational overhead. While recent work leverages quantile regression to estimate conditional thresholds, it fails to capture epistemic uncertainty, resulting in bias in low-density regions. In this work, we propose a novel approach - Bayesian Membership Inference Attack (BMIA), which performs conditional attack through Bayesian inference. In particular, we transform a trained reference model into Bayesian neural networks by Laplace approximation, enabling the direct estimation of the conditional score distribution by probabilistic model parameters. Our method addresses both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty with only a reference model, enabling efficient and powerful MIA. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of BMIA.