Skip to content

Author

Hongsheng Hu

2 papers indexed here

We haven’t gathered this author’s papers yet. Follow them and we’ll fetch their work.

Not the right person? Other researchers publish under this name.

Preprint Jul 2026

From Multiplicity to Vulnerability: Privacy Amplification Risk from One-Dataset-Multiple-Model Exposure

To efficiently exploit a valuable data source (e.g., facial or medical images), it is frequently harnessed to fulfill multiple learning objectives (e.g., facial recognition, age estimation, and race classification). Each trained model is then deployed as an independent API service for corresponding inference. However, the privacy risk introduced by this one-dataset-multiple-model (ODMM) paradigm is completely overlooked by the community. For the first time, this work reveals that the ODMM setting substantially amplifies privacy leakage. We establish a theoretical framework that proves that privacy leakage accumulates as more ODMM models are exposed, a phenomenon we term ODMM privacy composition. Guided by this theoretical foundation, we propose PRIME (Privacy Amplification RIsk from One-Dataset-Multiple-Model Exposure) to systematically assess this risk and quantify the resulting leakage using membership inference attacks (MIAs). Under black-box access to ODMM models, we design an aggregation mechanism that collectively captures carefully identified privacy signals leaked by individual ODMM models, and construct an attack meta-classifier over the aggregated meta-information to infer the membership status of a given sample jointly. Our results provide strong evidence that dataset reuse across ODMM models strikingly jeopardizes privacy, which is consistently evident across five privacy-sensitive image and textual benchmark datasets and diverse model architectures (from ResNet and ViT to Qwen3-1.7B), spanning three domains: facial analysis, medical imaging, and textual attribution analysis. While mitigations such as differential privacy can reduce the effectiveness of PRIME with trade-offs, our attack still consistently outperforms single-task MIAs.

Qirui Huang, Na Li, Hongsheng Hu et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

When T2I Synthetic Data Backfires: Amplified Privacy Risks in Real-Synthetic Mix Training

To overcome data scarcity and privacy constraints in data collection, it has become standard practice across academia and industry to augment real training data with text-to-image (T2I)-generated synthetic data, a paradigm we term Real-Synthetic Mix-Training (RSMT). While substituting synthetic data for sensitive real samples is widely regarded as a means to mitigate privacy exposure of the substituted data, the risk to the remaining real samples that actively participate in training has remained largely unexamined. This work reveals, for the first time, that RSMT can substantially amplify privacy leakage of these real training samples. We establish a theoretical framework, RSMT Memorization Amplification, proving that incorporating synthetic data displaces real samples toward peripheral regions of the mixed feature space, in turn forcing the model to memorize them more aggressively. Guided by this foundation, we propose RSMixLeak to systematically assess this risk through membership inference attacks (MIAs). RSMixLeak comprises two variants depending on the adversary's capability. The non-adversarial variant audits a benign RSMT pipeline with an honest T2I provider, establishing a lower bound on the leakage induced by the intrinsic gap between real and T2I-generated data. The adversarial variant considers an adversary who controls the T2I model or contributes crafted data to the T2I provider, and deliberately enlarges this distributional gap on a target class via either high-level semantic attribute binding or imperceptible pixel-level coating, further amplifying leakage on real training data while improving downstream model utility. Motivated by these findings, we further propose a lightweight leakage propensity indicator computable from real data alone that reliably identifies high-risk datasets unsuitable for entering RSMT, as a self-assessable mitigation.

Na Li, Boyu Kuang, Hongsheng Hu et al. · 0 citations