Distinguished Lecture Series: Ninghui Li, Samuel D. Conte Professor and Associate Department Head, Computer Science, Purdue University
Date & Time: December 03, 2025 from 12:00 PM - 01:15 PM
Location: Westgate Building, E208
"Membership Inference Attacks: History, Recent Progress, and Future Directions"
Membership inference attacks (MIAs) assess how much a machine learning (ML) model reveals about its training data by determining whether specific instances were included in the training set of a target model. Over the past decade, MIAs have been extensively studied, both to understand the extent of privacy threat due to MIAs, and the usage of MIAs for empirical privacy auditing of ML models. In this talk, I will provide an overview of MIAs, highlighting key concepts, recent advances, and emerging research directions. I will begin by tracing the early history of research on MIA and its connection to Differential Privacy. I will then discuss the formulation of the MIA security game and present some prominent techniques of MIA. Next, I will introduce our recent work on improving both the effectiveness and efficiency of MIAs on classifiers by exploiting membership dependency and leveraging target model behaviors. Finally, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities in extending MIAs to large language models (LLMs), as well as the broader privacy implications that arise in this context.
About the Speaker
Ninghui Li is Samuel D. Conte Professor and Associate Department Head of Computer Science at Purdue University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in 2000. Before joining the faculty of Purdue University, he was a Research Associate at Stanford University Computer Science Department from 2000 to 2003. His research interests are in security and privacy. He has over 29000 citations and an H-index of 81, and has received multiple best paper wards and test of time awards in security and database conferences. He is currently serving as Chair of the Steering Committee for ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), and served as Chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) from 2017 to 2021. He recently served as Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) from 2020 to 2024, and has served as Program Chair for several leading conferences in the field, including ACM CCS, ESORICS, and AsiaCCS. He is an ACM fellow and an IEEE Fellow.
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