📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

The growing trend of legal disputes over the unauthorized use of data in machine learning (ML) systems highlights the urgent need for reliable data-use auditing mechanisms to ensure accountability and transparency in ML. We present the first proactive, instance-level, data-use auditing method designed to enable data owners to audit the use of their individual data instances in ML models, providing more fine-grained auditing results than previous work. To do so, our research generalizes previous work integrating black-box membership inference and sequential hypothesis testing, expanding its scope of application while preserving the quantifiable and tunable false-detection rate that is its hallmark. We evaluate our method on three types of visual ML models: image classifiers, visual encoders, and vision-language models (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) and Bootstrapping Language-Image Pretraining (BLIP) models). In addition, we apply our method to evaluate the performance of two state-of-the-art approximate unlearning methods. As a noteworthy second contribution, our work reveals that neither method successfully removes the influence of the unlearned data instances from image classifiers and CLIP models, even if sacrificing model utility by $10\%$.