Membership Inference in Fine-tuned Diffusion Language Models via Token-level Memorization Asymmetry

Masked Diffusion Language Models MDLMs replace autoregressive generation with iterative demasking and their privacy properties are largely unstudied. We study membership inference attacks MIA on fine tuned MDLMs and show they are significantly more vulnerable than current grey box baselines suggest. We extract a 46 dimensional feature vector from the models reconstruction loss at four masking ratios and train XGBoost and MLP classifiers on top. On the MIMIR benchmark across six text domains XGBoost achieves mean AUC 0.878 peaking at 0.930 on Pile CC and beats the SAMA grey box baseline by 0.062 AUC on average. A leave one signal out ablation shows that the ELBO trajectory alone drives most of this with a mean drop of 0.130 when removed while attention features add almost nothing below 0.003. We also design a shadow model transfer attack where K equals 3 surrogate MDLMs trained on data from unrelated domains generate classifier labels with no access to the target domain. This achieves 0.858 mean AUC within 0.020 of the white box oracle and establishes shadow model transfer as a practical and near equally effective attack path.

Memorization in large language models has been studied almost exclusively through prefix-conditioned extraction, a natural choice for autoregressive models. However, diffusion language models (DLMs) can denoise masked tokens at arbitrary positions. Thus, prefix-only probing reveals only one facet of memorization in DLMs and significantly underestimates the risk of training-data extraction. In order to realistically model extractability of training data in DLMs, we introduce \emph{infilling extraction}, a data-extraction protocol parameterized by an arbitrary binary mask that subsumes prefix-only probing and accounts for the bidirectional inductive bias of DLMs. Instantiating it on LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B across five extraction modes, three training pipelines, and three corpora covering verbatim and partial leakage, we find that mask geometry governs extractability: edge-conditioned masks \emph{extract up to three times more} verbatim sequences than prefix-conditioned ones, and bidirectional access opens channels inaccessible in autoregressive models. In particular, we show that a realistic adversary with access to training data where personally identifiable information has been redacted, can even achieve higher recall on extracting redacted email addresses from DLMs than from scale-matched autoregressive models. Tunable parameters for decoding measurably affect extraction performance, while a follow-up supervised finetuning stage does not eliminate the prior memorization.

Language models are almost always quantized before they are deployed, and a growing line of work asks whether quantization also lowers their privacy risk. That work measures privacy almost entirely with membership inference. We think this is the wrong thing to measure for the risk that most people actually worry about, namely a model reproducing its training data word for word, and we measure that directly. Using the Pythia models and the public set of sequences each of them is known to have memorized, we track verbatim extraction across five precision levels, from full precision down to four bits, and across three model sizes, while measuring general capability (perplexity) at every point. We find two things. Quantization is a selective forgetter: verbatim memorization falls off faster than capability at every precision and every model size we tried, and this holds under two unrelated quantization algorithms and two evaluation corpora. But the selectivity is not enough to make quantization a privacy defense, which cuts against the optimistic reading of earlier membership-inference results. At the largest model we study, four-bit quantization still reproduces most of the memorized sequences while giving up only a few percent of capability, and the fraction of memorized data that survives quantization grows with model size. We conclude that compression should not be treated as a way to remove memorized training data, and that extraction, not membership inference, is the number practitioners should be watching. All code, sampled evaluation data, and per-configuration results are released.