Qi Li
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2026
Refinement Provenance Inference: Detecting LLM-Refined Training Prompts from Model Behavior
Bo Yin | Qi Li | Runpeng Yu | Xinchao Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Bo Yin | Qi Li | Runpeng Yu | Xinchao Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Instruction tuning increasingly relies on LLM-based prompt refinement, where prompts in the training corpus are selectively rewritten by an external refiner to improve clarity and instruction alignment. This motivates an instance-level audit problem: for a fine-tuned model and a training prompt–response pair, can we infer whether the model was trained on the original prompt or its LLM-refined version within a mixed corpus? This matters for dataset governance and dispute resolution when training data are contested. However, it is non-trivial in practice: refined and raw instances are interleaved in the training corpus with unknown, source-dependent mixture ratios, making it harder to develop provenance methods that generalize across models and training setups. In this paper, we formalize this audit task as Refinement Provenance Inference (RPI) and show that prompt refinement yields stable, detectable shifts in teacher-forced token distributions, even when semantic differences are not obvious. Building on this phenomenon, we propose RePro, a logit-based provenance framework that fuses teacher-forced likelihood features with logit-ranking signals. During training, RePro learns a transferable representation via shadow fine-tuning, and uses a lightweight linear head to infer provenance on unseen victims without training-data access. Empirically, RePro consistently attains strong performance and transfers well across refiners, suggesting that it exploits refiner-agnostic distribution shifts rather than rewrite-style artifacts.
CoLA: A Choice Leakage Attack Framework to Expose Privacy Risks in Subset Training
Qi Li | Cheng-Long Wang | Yinzhi Cao | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qi Li | Cheng-Long Wang | Yinzhi Cao | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Training models on a carefully chosen portion of data rather than the full dataset is now a standard preprocess for modern ML. From vision coreset selection to large-scale filtering in language models, it enables scalability with minimal utility loss. A common intuition is that training on fewer samples should also reduce privacy risks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption. We show that subset training is not privacy free: the very choices of which data are included or excluded can introduce new privacy surface and leak more sensitive information. Such information can be captured by adversaries either through side-channel metadata from the subset selection process or via the outputs of the target model. To systematically study this phenomenon, we propose CoLA (Choice Leakage Attack), a unified framework for analyzing privacy leakage in subset selection. In CoLA, depending on the adversary’s knowledge of the side-channel information, we define two practical attack scenarios: Subset-aware Side-channel Attacks and Black-box Attacks. Under both scenarios, we investigate two privacy surfaces unique to subset training: (1) Training-membership MIA (TM-MIA), which concerns only the privacy of training data membership, and (2) Selection-participation MIA (SP-MIA), which concerns the privacy of all samples that participated in the subset selection process. Notably, SP-MIA enlarges the notion of membership from model training to the entire data-model supply chain. Experiments on vision and language models show that existing threat models underestimate subset-training privacy risks: the expanded privacy surface leaks both training and selection membership, extending risks from individual models to the broader ML ecosystem.