Simulating Training Dynamics to Reconstruct Training Data from Deep Neural Networks

Whether deep neural networks (DNNs) memorize the training data is a fundamental open question in understanding deep learning. A direct way to verify the memorization of DNNs is to reconstruct training data from DNNs’ parameters. Since parameters are gradually determined by data throughout training, characterizing training dynamics is important for reconstruction. Pioneering works rely on the linear training dynamics of shallow NNs with large widths, but cannot be extended to more practical DNNs which have non-linear dynamics. We propose Simulation of training Dynamics (SimuDy) to reconstruct training data from DNNs. Specifically, we simulate the training dynamics by training the model from the initial parameters with a dummy dataset, then optimize this dummy dataset so that the simulated dynamics reach the same final parameters as the true dynamics. By incorporating dummy parameters in the simulated dynamics, SimuDy effectively describes non-linear training dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that SimuDy significantly outperforms previous approaches when handling non-linear training dynamics, and for the first time, most training samples can be reconstructed from a trained ResNet’s parameters.

In International Conference on Learning Representations 2025 Poster