Embedding-Space Fingerprinting of LoRA Fine-Tunes: Recovering the Training-Data Domain from the Model Artifact Alone
TL;DR
The domain of a fine-tune trained on a previously unseen dataset is recoverable well above chance from gray-box activations and black-box outputs, and activations and outputs were more informative than the weight-delta statistics.
Abstract
When a base language model is fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), how much of the training data domain leaks into the resulting artifact? This paper studies whether a simple classifier can recover the domain of a fine-tune given only the model artifact (weight deltas, internal activations on a fixed probe set, or generated text) without ever observing the training data. Using one base model (Qwen3.5-0.8B), 36 LoRA fine-tunes are produced over 18 public datasets in five domains (medical, code, mathematics, non-English text, narrative prose), and three feature families are extracted at decreasing levels of access: white-box weights, gray-box activations, and black-box outputs. A leave-one-dataset-out (LODO) protocol, frozen before any result was seen, tests whether the domain of a fine-tune trained on a previously unseen dataset can be identified. The domain is recoverable well above chance (20%) from gray-box activations (61%) and black-box outputs (64%); white-box weight statistics reach 42%. Contrary to the pre-registered hypothesis that signal decays monotonically from weights to activations to outputs, activations and outputs were more informative than the weight-delta statistics. The black-box result holds unchanged (64%) when only generated text is used, without token probabilities. Domain accuracy is also stable when a third run per dataset is trained on an independently drawn data subsample, and black-box predictions are unaffected by the LoRA rank (8-64). All code and per-run feature vectors are released.
