Breaking the Gold Standard: Extracting Forgotten Data under Exact Unlearning in Large Language Models

Large language models are typically trained on datasets collected from the web, which may inadvertently contain harmful or sensitive personal information. To address growing privacy concerns, unlearning methods have been proposed to remove the influence of specific data from trained models. Of these, exact unlearning -- which retrains the model from scratch without the target data -- is widely regarded the gold standard, believed to be robust against privacy-related attacks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by introducing a novel data extraction attack that compromises even exact unlearning. Our method leverages both the pre- and post-unlearning models: by guiding the post-unlearning model using signals from the pre-unlearning model, we uncover patterns that reflect the removed data distribution. Combining model guidance with a token filtering strategy, our attack significantly improves extraction success rates -- doubling performance in some cases -- across common benchmarks such as MUSE, TOFU, and WMDP. Furthermore, we demonstrate our attack's effectiveness on a simulated medical diagnosis dataset to highlight real-world privacy risks associated with exact unlearning. In light of our findings, which suggest that unlearning may, in a contradictory way, increase the risk of privacy leakage, we advocate for evaluation of unlearning methods to consider broader threat models that account not only for post-unlearning models but also for adversarial access to prior checkpoints.

Winning the MIDST Challenge: New Membership Inference Attacks on Diffusion Models for Tabular Data Synthesis

Tabular data synthesis using diffusion models has gained significant attention for its potential to balance data utility and privacy. However, existing privacy evaluations often rely on heuristic metrics or weak membership inference attacks (MIA), leaving privacy risks inadequately assessed. In this work, we conduct a rigorous MIA study on diffusion-based tabular synthesis, revealing that state-of-the-art attacks designed for image models fail in this setting. We identify noise initialization as a key factor influencing attack efficacy and propose a machine-learning-driven approach that leverages loss features across different noises and time steps. Our method, implemented with a lightweight MLP, effectively learns membership signals, eliminating the need for manual optimization. Experimental results from the MIDST Challenge @ SaTML 2025 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, securing first place across all tracks. Code is available at https://github.com/Nicholas0228/Tartan_Federer_MIDST.