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Takayuki Miura

Publications and source records attributed to Takayuki Miura.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

End-to-End Hard-Label Cryptanalytic Model Extraction Using Efficient Sign Recovery

The importance of deep neural networks (DNNs) is widely recognized, and the parameters obtained through training are regarded as valuable assets. Recently, attacks that extract these parameters using only oracle queries to a DNN have been actively studied at IACR conferences. The hard-label setting is the most challenging setting for model extraction, where an adversary can observe only the final output label, such as "dog" or "cat." At Eurocrypt 2025, Carlini et al. proposed polynomial-time hard-label extraction of ReLU-based MLPs. However, one step of this attack process, i.e., sign recovery, requires a large number of queries and substantial computation. Implementing this step in a black-box setting remains difficult. Consequently, a fully black-box end-to-end demonstration on trained deep ReLU MLPs has remained a challenge. In this paper, we propose a new sign-recovery algorithm based on a completely different principle from the existing method. Our method requires no dedicated queries for sign recovery. In our experiments, it achieves higher sign-recovery accuracy than the existing method. Consequently, it enables efficient sign recovery even for trained models. With our sign-recovery algorithm, all steps of hard-label model extraction can be implemented in a black-box setting. By combining these implementations, we demonstrate end-to-end model extraction from models trained on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, with width 16 and 4 or 6 hidden layers, achieving over 98% label agreement.

cs.CR↗

Is the Hard-Label Cryptanalytic Model Extraction Really Polynomial?

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have attracted significant attention, and their internal models are now considered valuable intellectual assets. Extracting such a model via oracle access to a DNN is conceptually similar to extracting a secret key from a block cipher. Consequently, cryptanalytic techniques, particularly differential-like attacks, have been actively explored. ReLU-based DNNs are the most common and widely deployed architectures. While early works (e.g., Crypto 2020, Eurocrypt 2024) assume access to exact output logits, which are typically not exposed, more recent works (e.g., Asiacrypt 2024, Eurocrypt 2025) focus on the hard-label setting, where only the final classification result (e.g., "dog" or "car") is available. Notably, Carlini et al. (Eurocrypt 2025) showed that model extraction is feasible in polynomial time even under this restricted setting. In this paper, we show that a key assumption underlying their attack becomes increasingly unrealistic as the target depth grows. While prior works noted neurons whose activation states rarely change, we analyze their concrete impact on hard-label extraction: even a single neuron that is (almost) always active can prevent the attack from proceeding unless its parameters are recovered, and ignoring it incurs a non-negligible error. A straightforward solution is to extract these parameters by observing a state switch of such a neuron, but observing such a switch becomes exponentially harder as depth increases, implying that hard-label extraction is not always polynomial time. To address this limitation, we propose a novel attack called cross-layer extraction. Rather than extracting secret parameters (e.g., weights and biases) directly, we exploit cross-layer interactions to recover them from deeper layers, reducing query complexity and addressing limitations of existing approaches.

cs.LG↗

Robust Backdoor Removal by Reconstructing Trigger-Activated Changes in Latent Representation

Backdoor attacks pose a critical threat to machine learning models, causing them to behave normally on clean data but misclassify poisoned data into a poisoned class. Existing defenses often attempt to identify and remove backdoor neurons based on Trigger-Activated Changes (TAC) which is the activation differences between clean and poisoned data. These methods suffer from low precision in identifying true backdoor neurons due to inaccurate estimation of TAC values. In this work, we propose a novel backdoor removal method by accurately reconstructing TAC values in the latent representation. Specifically, we formulate the minimal perturbation that forces clean data to be classified into a specific class as a convex quadratic optimization problem, whose optimal solution serves as a surrogate for TAC. We then identify the poisoned class by detecting statistically small $L^2$ norms of perturbations and leverage the perturbation of the poisoned class in fine-tuning to remove backdoors. Experiments on CIFAR-10, GTSRB, and TinyImageNet demonstrated that our approach consistently achieves superior backdoor suppression with high clean accuracy across different attack types, datasets, and architectures, outperforming existing defense methods.

cs.LG↗

Concept Unlearning in Large Language Models via Self-Constructed Knowledge Triplets

Machine Unlearning (MU) has recently attracted considerable attention as a solution to privacy and copyright issues in large language models (LLMs). Existing MU methods aim to remove specific target sentences from an LLM while minimizing damage to unrelated knowledge. However, these approaches require explicit target sentences and do not support removing broader concepts, such as persons or events. To address this limitation, we introduce Concept Unlearning (CU) as a new requirement for LLM unlearning. We leverage knowledge graphs to represent the LLM's internal knowledge and define CU as removing the forgetting target nodes and associated edges. This graph-based formulation enables a more intuitive unlearning and facilitates the design of more effective methods. We propose a novel method that prompts the LLM to generate knowledge triplets and explanatory sentences about the forgetting target and applies the unlearning process to these representations. Our approach enables more precise and comprehensive concept removal by aligning the unlearning process with the LLM's internal knowledge representations. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method effectively achieves concept-level unlearning while preserving unrelated knowledge.

cs.CL↗

Sparse-Autoencoder-Guided Internal Representation Unlearning for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across various applications, privacy and copyright concerns have heightened the need for more effective LLM unlearning techniques. Many existing unlearning methods aim to suppress undesirable outputs through additional training (e.g., gradient ascent), which reduces the probability of generating such outputs. While such suppression-based approaches can control model outputs, they may not eliminate the underlying knowledge embedded in the model's internal activations; muting a response is not the same as forgetting it. Moreover, such suppression-based methods often suffer from model collapse. To address these issues, we propose a novel unlearning method that directly intervenes in the model's internal activations. In our formulation, forgetting is defined as a state in which the activation of a forgotten target is indistinguishable from that of ``unknown'' entities. Our method introduces an unlearning objective that modifies the activation of the target entity away from those of known entities and toward those of unknown entities in a sparse autoencoder latent space. By aligning the target's internal activation with those of unknown entities, we shift the model's recognition of the target entity from ``known'' to ``unknown'', achieving genuine forgetting while avoiding over-suppression and model collapse. Empirically, we show that our method effectively aligns the internal activations of the forgotten target, a result that the suppression-based approaches do not reliably achieve. Additionally, our method effectively reduces the model's recall of target knowledge in question-answering tasks without significant damage to the non-target knowledge.

cs.CL↗

On Rényi Differential Privacy in Statistics-Based Synthetic Data Generation

Privacy protection with synthetic data generation often uses differentially private statistics and model parameters to quantitatively express theoretical security. However, these methods do not take into account privacy protection due to the randomness of data generation. In this paper, we theoretically evaluate Rényi differential privacy of the randomness in data generation of a synthetic data generation method that uses the mean vector and the covariance matrix of an original dataset. Specifically, for a fixed $α> 1$, we show the condition of $\varepsilon$ such that the synthetic data generation satisfies $(α, \varepsilon)$-Rényi differential privacy under a bounded neighboring condition and an unbounded neighboring condition, respectively. In particular, under the unbounded condition, when the size of the original dataset and synthetic datase is 10 million, the mechanism satisfies $(4, 0.576)$-Rényi differential privacy. We also show that when we translate it into the traditional $(\varepsilon, δ)$-differential privacy, the mechanism satisfies $(4.00, 10^{-10})$-differential privacy.

cs.CR↗

Membership Inference Attacks against Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have attracted attention in recent years as innovative generative models. In this paper, we investigate whether a diffusion model is resistant to a membership inference attack, which evaluates the privacy leakage of a machine learning model. We primarily discuss the diffusion model from the standpoints of comparison with a generative adversarial network (GAN) as conventional models and hyperparameters unique to the diffusion model, i.e., time steps, sampling steps, and sampling variances. We conduct extensive experiments with DDIM as a diffusion model and DCGAN as a GAN on the CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets in both white-box and black-box settings and then confirm if the diffusion model is comparably resistant to a membership inference attack as GAN. Next, we demonstrate that the impact of time steps is significant and intermediate steps in a noise schedule are the most vulnerable to the attack. We also found two key insights through further analysis. First, we identify that DDIM is vulnerable to the attack for small sample sizes instead of achieving a lower FID. Second, sampling steps in hyperparameters are important for resistance to the attack, whereas the impact of sampling variances is quite limited.

cs.CR↗

MEGEX: Data-Free Model Extraction Attack against Gradient-Based Explainable AI

The advance of explainable artificial intelligence, which provides reasons for its predictions, is expected to accelerate the use of deep neural networks in the real world like Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) that returns predictions on queried data with the trained model. Deep neural networks deployed in MLaaS face the threat of model extraction attacks. A model extraction attack is an attack to violate intellectual property and privacy in which an adversary steals trained models in a cloud using only their predictions. In particular, a data-free model extraction attack has been proposed recently and is more critical. In this attack, an adversary uses a generative model instead of preparing input data. The feasibility of this attack, however, needs to be studied since it requires more queries than that with surrogate datasets. In this paper, we propose MEGEX, a data-free model extraction attack against a gradient-based explainable AI. In this method, an adversary uses the explanations to train the generative model and reduces the number of queries to steal the model. Our experiments show that our proposed method reconstructs high-accuracy models -- 0.97$\times$ and 0.98$\times$ the victim model accuracy on SVHN and CIFAR-10 datasets given 2M and 20M queries, respectively. This implies that there is a trade-off between the interpretability of models and the difficulty of stealing them.

cs.CR↗