WaKA: Data Attribution using K-Nearest Neighbors and Membership Privacy Principles

In this paper, we introduce WaKA (Wasserstein K-nearest neighbors Attribution), a novel attribution method that leverages principles from the LiRA (Likelihood Ratio Attack) framework and applies them to \( k \)-nearest neighbors classifiers (\( k \)-NN). WaKA efficiently measures the contribution of individual data points to the model's loss distribution, analyzing every possible \( k \)-NN that can be constructed using the training set, without requiring sampling or shadow model training. WaKA can be used \emph{a posteriori} as a membership inference attack (MIA) to assess privacy risks, and \emph{a priori} for data minimization and privacy influence measurement. Thus, WaKA can be seen as bridging the gap between data attribution and membership inference attack (MIA) literature by distinguishing between the value of a data point and its privacy risk. For instance, we show that self-attribution values are more strongly correlated with the attack success rate than the contribution of a point to model generalization. WaKA's different usages were also evaluated across diverse real-world datasets, demonstrating performance very close to LiRA when used as an MIA on \( k \)-NN classifiers, but with greater computational efficiency.