cs.LGJun 24, 2026

Dataset Usage Inference without Shadow Models or Held-out Data

Authors: Wojciech ŁapaczStanisław PawlakJan DubińskiFranziska BoenischAdam Dziedzic

Organizations: Warsaw University of Technology · CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Abstract

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.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Watermarking for Proprietary Dataset Protection

    Jul 1, 2026John Kirchenbauer, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura +1Membership InferenceWatermarking

  2. MGI: Member vs Generated Inference

    Jun 22, 2026Bihe Zhao, Michel Meintz, Juangui Xu +2Membership InferenceGenerative Models