Training datasets have tremendous proprietary value and are vulnerable to unauthorized copying. Existing defenses mainly focus on tracking individual data points, but pay little attention to the threat of dataset regeneration. Through a measurement study of public tumor datasets, we identify substantial real-world partial-dataset replication, raising concerns about potential license noncompliance. To counter the challenge of tracking previously unknown adversarial regeneration, our key insight is that regeneration that preserves model utility inevitably preserves measurable signals across multiple feature scales. We categorize these dataset features into sample-, set-, and distribution-level features and design four similarity metrics to accurately identify regeneration. Based on these metrics, we develop DIPBox, which to our knowledge is the first testing framework that tracks regeneration suspects via multi-scale similarity testing across a spectrum of defender access settings, from limited to full information. We further provide a learning-theoretic analysis that justifies these multi-scale metrics and formalizes an inherent utility--divergence trade-off, implying fundamental limits on evasive regeneration. Extensive experiments on 16 vision and text base datasets, 320 regenerated datasets, and 590 derived models validate that DIPBox outperforms previous solutions while characterizing its robustness and limits under three adaptive attacks.
How much of my data was used to train a machine learning model? Dataset Usage Inference (DUI) aims to answer this by estimating what fraction of a dataset contributed to a model's training. However, existing DUI methods rely on assumptions that rarely hold in practice: they require training expensive shadow models to imitate the target model, and they assume access to both known training samples and an in-distribution held-out set confirmed to be absent from training. These conditions make current approaches impractical for modern large models and real data ownership disputes. We introduce a practical DUI framework that removes these constraints. Our method requires neither shadow models nor real held-out data. Instead, it generates synthetic non-member samples, extracts diverse membership signals, and casts DUI as a mixture proportion estimation problem to estimate what share of the candidate dataset was used during training. Experiments on large image generative models show that our method reliably quantifies dataset usage, providing a practical tool for data owners to determine how much of their data was used to train a model.
Wojciech Łapacz, Stanisław Pawlak, Jan Dubiński +2
The scale of speech anti-spoofing datasets has grown exponentially over the past decade, driven by the assumption that larger data leads to better performance. However, it remains unclear whether indiscriminate scaling commensurately improves model generalization. This study challenges the "scale-first" paradigm by decoupling the impacts of training data scale versus diversity. Through experiments on representative datasets, we report two key findings: (1) Larger is not always better. Expanding data scale excessively under fixed generation methods yields negligible returns and may even degrade cross-domain generalization due to overfitting.(2) Diversity outweighs scale. A smaller composite training set featuring diverse attacks significantly outperforms larger-scale datasets with limited diversity in cross-dataset evaluations. We conclude that future dataset construction should prioritize the diversity of generation methods over scale to effectively enhance model generalization.
The tendency of large generative models to memorize training data makes sample verification critical for privacy auditing and copyright enforcement. Current membership (MIA) and dataset inference (DI) attacks often rely on one-shot generations, which yield weak signals and limited sensitivity across modalities. Inspired by Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD), we introduce MADreMIA, a model-agnostic framework that enhances white-, gray-, and black-box MIA and DI. Rather than relying on shadow model training -- often infeasible for large generative models -- our framework facilitates scalable inference by leveraging inherent signals through iterative trajectories. This process utilizes chained generations across diverse modalities, where each output serves as the subsequent input, to improve membership evidence at low FPR. We demonstrate that memorized training samples exhibit significantly higher coherence and slower degradation during iterative regeneration than non-member generations. Our results show that MADreMIA provides richer signals across diverse model families and modalities; we present comprehensive evaluations for IARs, diffusion, and language models, alongside preliminary results demonstrating its potential for audio models.