Privacy Auditing of Multi-Domain Graph Pre-Trained Model Under Membership Inference Attacks

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Authors: Jiayi Luo, Qingyun Sun, Yuecen Wei, Haonan Yuan, Xingcheng Fu, Jianxin Li
Cited by: 2

Abstract

Multi-domain graph pre-training has emerged as a pivotal technique in developing graph foundation models. While it greatly improves the generalization of graph neural networks, its privacy risks under membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to identify whether a specific instance was used in training (member), remain largely unexplored. However, effectively conducting MIAs against multi-domain graph pre-trained models is a significant challenge due to: (i) Enhanced Generalization Capability: Multi-domain pre-training reduces the overfitting characteristics commonly exploited by MIAs. (ii) Unrepresentative Shadow Datasets: Diverse training graphs hinder the obtaining of reliable shadow graphs. (iii) Weakened Membership Signals: Embedding-based outputs offer less informative cues than logits for MIAs. To tackle these challenges, we propose MGP-MIA, a novel framework for Membership Inference Attacks against Multi-domain Graph Pre-trained models. Specifically, we first propose a membership signal amplification mechanism that amplifies the overfitting characteristics of target models via machine unlearning. We then design an incremental shadow model construction mechanism that builds a reliable shadow model with limited shadow graphs via incremental learning. Finally, we introduce a similarity-based inference mechanism that identifies members based on their similarity to positive and negative samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed MGP-MIA and reveal the privacy risks of multi-domain graph pre-training.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Advanced Graph Neural Networks Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data Machine Learning in Healthcare

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Publisher
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Volume
40
Issue
18
Pages
15483–15491
Publication date
14 March 2026
Language
EN