inLoRA-MINT: Internal Representations for Auditing Training Data in Domain-adapted LLMs

Abstract

This work investigates the application of the Membership Inference Test (MINT) to large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with LoRA, aiming to determine whether specific samples were used during training and address concerns about data privacy, leakage, and transparency. Building on our previous LoRA-MINT framework, which relies exclusively on perplexity under a strict black-box setting, we propose an approach based on intermediate model representations, including activations and parameter-dependent signals. These representations enable a MINT classifier to distinguish training from non-training samples without requiring full access to model parameters. We evaluated the method on four LLMs (Qwen, Phi-4, DeepSeek-V3, and LLaMA 3.2-3B) fine-tuned on three datasets covering medical, mathematical, and academic reasoning tasks. Results show consistent performance across architectures and domains, achieving scores between 95% and 98%, with robustness to variations in model configurations and data distributions. The proposed approach enables efficient auditing of sensitive training data and supports data provenance and compliance with emerging privacy and AI governance regulations. Although our experiments focus on LoRA-based fine-tuning, the methodology can be extended to other LLM adaptation techniques and, more broadly, to other AI models.