TIER: Trajectory-Invariant Explanation Regularization for Membership Privacy

Abstract

Explainability is central to building trustworthy AI, yet explanation interfaces can inadvertently provide adversaries with an expanded privacy-related attack surfaces. Recent studies show that advanced membership-inference attacks succeed by exploiting confidence-drop trajectories, induced through attribution-guided perturbations, as discriminative features, rather than directly using confidence scores or explanation vectors. Existing defenses against membership inference fail to directly mitigate such explanation-driven attacks. In this work, we investigate whether, during training, a model's own gradients can be leveraged as defense signals against such attacks, thereby aligning explanation profiles between members and non-members. To this end, we propose a Trajectory-Invariant Explanation Regularization (TIER) defense that penalizes erratic fluctuations in confidence drops simulated through gradient-guided perturbations and simultaneously minimizes the distributional shifts via KL-divergence. Unlike conventional adversarial training, which emphasizes label robustness, our approach targets explanation robustness by enforcing self-consistency through KL-divergence and reducing the variance of confidence drops between members and non-members. Extensive experiments confirm that our method effectively mitigates these attacks, delivering privacy protection while maintaining model utility and explanation fidelity.