Observational Auditing of Privacy

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19807 Authors

Keywords: privacy auditing, label differential privacy, protected attributes

Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) auditing is essential for evaluating privacy guarantees in machine learning systems. Existing auditing methods, however, pose a significant challenge for large-scale systems since they require modifying the training dataset—for instance, by injecting out-of-distribution canaries or removing samples from training. Such interventions on the training data pipeline are resource-intensive and involve considerable engineering overhead. We introduce a novel observational auditing framework that leverages the inherent randomness of data distributions, enabling privacy evaluation without altering the original dataset. Our approach extends privacy auditing beyond traditional membership inference to protected attributes, with labels as a special case, addressing a key gap in existing techniques. We provide theoretical foundations for our method and perform experiments on Criteo and CIFAR-10 datasets that demonstrate its effectiveness in auditing label privacy guarantees. This work opens new avenues for practical privacy auditing in large-scale production environments.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 19807