Fatih Turkmen


2026

Membership inference attacks (MIA) aim to infer whether a particular data point is part of the training dataset of a model. In this paper, we propose a new task in the context of LLM privacy: entity-level discovery of membership risk focused on sensitive information (PII, credit card numbers, etc). Existing methods for MIA can detect the presence of entire prompts or documents in the LLM training data, but they fail to capture risks at a finer granularity. We propose the “EL-MIA” framework for auditing entity-level membership risks in LLMs. We construct a benchmark dataset for the evaluation of MIA methods on this task. Using this benchmark, we conduct a systematic comparison of existing MIA techniques as well as two newly proposed methods. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the results, trying to explain the relation of the entity level MIA susceptability with the model scale, training epochs, and other surface level factors. Our findings reveal that existing MIA methods are limited when it comes to entity-level membership inference of the sensitive attributes, while this susceptibility can be outlined with relatively straightforward methods, highlighting the need for stronger adversaries to stress test the provided threat model.

2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to memorize and reproduce parts of their training data during inference, raising significant privacy and safety concerns. While this phenomenon has been extensively studied to explain its contributing factors and countermeasures, its implications in multilingual contexts remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual differences in memorization behaviors of multilingual LLMs. Specifically, we examine both discoverable memorization and susceptibility to perplexity ratio attacks using Pythia models of varying sizes, evaluated on two parallel multilingual datasets. Our results reveal that lower-resource languages consistently exhibit higher vulnerability to perplexity ratio attacks, indicating greater privacy risks. In contrast, patterns of discoverable memorization appear to be influenced more strongly by the model’s pretraining or fine-tuning phases than by language resource level alone. These findings highlight the nuanced interplay between language resource availability and memorization in multilingual LLMs, providing insights toward developing safer and more privacy-preserving language models across diverse linguistic settings.

2021

We study the problem of domain adaptation in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) when domain-specific data cannot be shared due to confidentiality or copyright issues. As a first step, we propose to fragment data into phrase pairs and use a random sample to fine-tune a generic NMT model instead of the full sentences. Despite the loss of long segments for the sake of confidentiality protection, we find that NMT quality can considerably benefit from this adaptation, and that further gains can be obtained with a simple tagging technique.