Riddle Me This! Stealthy Membership Inference for Retrieval-Augmented
  Generation
Authors: name: Ali Naseh; name: Yuefeng Peng; name: Anshuman Suri; name: Harsh Chaudhari; name: Alina Oprea; name: Amir Houmansadr
Published: 2025-02-01 04:01:18

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to
generate grounded responses by leveraging external knowledge databases without
altering model parameters. Although the absence of weight tuning prevents
leakage via model parameters, it introduces the risk of inference adversaries
exploiting retrieved documents in the model's context. Existing methods for
membership inference and data extraction often rely on jailbreaking or
carefully crafted unnatural queries, which can be easily detected or thwarted
with query rewriting techniques common in RAG systems. In this work, we present
Interrogation Attack (IA), a membership inference technique targeting documents
in the RAG datastore. By crafting natural-text queries that are answerable only
with the target document's presence, our approach demonstrates successful
inference with just 30 queries while remaining stealthy; straightforward
detectors identify adversarial prompts from existing methods up to ~76x more
frequently than those generated by our attack. We observe a 2x improvement in
TPR@1%FPR over prior inference attacks across diverse RAG configurations, all
while costing less than $0.02 per document inference.