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Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained on tabular data, which,
unlike unstructured text, often contains personally identifiable information
(PII) in a highly structured and explicit format. As a result, privacy risks
arise, since sensitive records can be inadvertently retained by the model and
exposed through data extraction or membership inference attacks (MIAs). While
existing MIA methods primarily target textual content, their efficacy and
threat implications may differ when applied to structured data, due to its
limited content, diverse data types, unique value distributions, and
column-level semantics. In this paper, we present Tab-MIA, a benchmark dataset
for evaluating MIAs on tabular data in LLMs and demonstrate how it can be used.
Tab-MIA comprises five data collections, each represented in six different
encoding formats. Using our Tab-MIA benchmark, we conduct the first evaluation
of state-of-the-art MIA methods on LLMs finetuned with tabular data across
multiple encoding formats. In the evaluation, we analyze the memorization
behavior of pretrained LLMs on structured data derived from Wikipedia tables.
Our findings show that LLMs memorize tabular data in ways that vary across
encoding formats, making them susceptible to extraction via MIAs. Even when
fine-tuned for as few as three epochs, models exhibit high vulnerability, with
AUROC scores approaching 90% in most cases. Tab-MIA enables systematic
evaluation of these risks and provides a foundation for developing
privacy-preserving methods for tabular data in LLMs.