Detecting Non-Membership in LLM Training Data via Rank Correlations

Large Language Models (LLMs) utilize large amounts of data for their training, some of which may come from copyrighted sources. Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) aim to detect those documents and whether they have been included in the training corpora of the LLMs. The black-box MIAs require a significant amount of data manipulation; therefore, their comparison is often challenging. We study state-of-the-art (SOTA) MIAs under the black-box assumptions and compare them to each other using a unified set of datasets to determine if any of them can reliably detect membership under SOTA LLMs. In addition, a new method, called the Familiarity Ranking, was developed to showcase a possible approach to black-box MIAs, thereby giving LLMs more freedom in their expression to understand their reasoning better. The results indicate that none of the methods are capable of reliably detecting membership in LLMs, as shown by an AUC-ROC of approximately 0.5 for all methods across several LLMs. The higher TPR and FPR for more advanced LLMs indicate higher reasoning and generalizing capabilities, showcasing the difficulty of detecting membership in LLMs using black-box MIAs.

Membership inference on large language models (LLMs) aims to determine whether a given text sample was included in an LLM's training data, without access to its training corpus. Despite recent progress, existing benchmarks suffer from three limitations: limited coverage of training stages, insufficient distributional alignment between members and non-members, and lack of rigorous filtering of non-members against the training corpus. To address these limitations, we propose OLMo-Detect, a multi-stage, confounder-controlled benchmark built upon the fully open OLMo 2 pipeline. OLMo-Detect spans pre-training, mid-training, and post-training, explicitly aligns members and non-members on three key axes, and rigorously filters non-members via infini-gram. To assess robustness to distribution shifts, we further introduce OLMo-Detect (Shifted), a variant where members are misaligned with non-members. We evaluate 15 unsupervised and 3 supervised membership inference attacks (MIAs) across the OLMo 2 family, finding that: (i) overall performance is limited: the best unsupervised and supervised MIAs both reach an AUC of only 0.68, and supervised MIAs degrade under cross-domain evaluation; (ii) MIA performance peaks at mid-training and is lower at pre-training and post-training, a pattern driven by data type rather than a stage effect: curated math data is far more detectable than other types; (iii) overall scores improve from 1B to 13B but plateau at 32B; and (iv) no unsupervised MIA is robust to distribution shifts, with AUCs shifting by up to 0.42. Finally, we find that our findings on OLMo 2 generalize to OLMo 3 and non-OLMo models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) raise growing concerns about privacy leakage and copyright compliance. Membership inference is a key tool for assessing such risks, but existing studies mainly focus on whether specific samples or sample-based data units are used for training. We argue that LLMs exhibit a human-memory-like behavior: an LLM may not memorize a specific sample verbatim, yet it can accumulate and reveal knowledge about a real-world entity from scattered mentions. This analogy motivates us to examine whether an LLM can be interrogated like a human interviewee to reveal its exposure to entity-related information. Motivated by this question, we propose entity-level membership inference, which determines whether information related to a target entity is used in LLM training. We study this task in the practical label-only black-box setting, where only generated texts are observable. We formalize the task under clue, input, and model constraints, establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for its feasibility, and instantiate five interrogation strategies based on this formalization. The strategies use limited entity clues to construct prompts, elicit entity-related responses, and infer membership from semantic features among the generated texts. We construct entity-level datasets and adapt state-of-the-art sample-level label-only methods to the entity-level setting as baselines. Experiments on person entities show that our methods achieve AUC up to 0.97 and bring gains of 6.0%--17.5% in Balanced Accuracy over the best adapted baseline.