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The Paper List on Data Contamination for Large Language Models Evaluation.

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Awesome Data Contamination

Awesome License: MIT

The paper list on data contamination for large language models evaluation.

🔔 News

  • [2024-01-02] We create this repository to maintain a paper list on Data Contamination.

🔍 Contents

🌟 Data Contamination

Data Contamination, also known as train-test contamination or benchmark leakage, indicates the case in which the model has seen information (e.g., test instances, test prompts, etc.) about the test set to be evaluated on during training. This issue has become particularly crucial in the era of foundation models, as they are typically trained on massive data that is poorly understood, raising the risk of unintentional contamination and resulting in a false positive on the model performance.

📜 Papers

🏷️ Tagset

In this paper list, we tag each paper with one or more labels defined in the table below. These tags serve the purpose of facilitating the related work searching.

Category Explanation
This paper proposes the reactive approach(es) for identifying data contamination risk after the contamination happens. It is sometimes termed contamination detection.
This paper discusses the preventative approach(es) to avoid data contamination before it happens.
This paper formally and extensively discusses the data contamination problem and presents relevant experimental observations and findings.
This paper describes or provides a system or software for handling various data contamination challenges, e.g., detecting contamination, providing a contamination index, etc.
This paper releases datasets directly targeted at data contamination, i.e., not general-purpose datasets like pretraining corpora.
This is a data contamination survey paper.

🎯 The List

Note

The list is sorted by the date of the first time the paper was released.

  1. Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (NeurIPS 2020)
    Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Chris Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam McCandlish, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei [paper]

    Abstract We demonstrate that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even becoming competitive with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any previous non-sparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting. For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model. GPT-3 achieves strong performance on many NLP datasets, including translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks. We also identify some datasets where GPT-3's few-shot learning still struggles, as well as some datasets where GPT-3 faces methodological issues related to training on large web corpora.

    This paper is not all about data contamination. Still, it is the very first paper that officially discusses the data contamination problem and presents an N-gram approach to identify the contamination risk of benchmarks (Appendix C).

  2. Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (EMNLP 2021)
    Jesse Dodge, Maarten Sap, Ana Marasović, William Agnew, Gabriel Ilharco, Dirk Groeneveld, Margaret Mitchell, Matt Gardner [paper]

    Abstract Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are frequently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.

    This paper only discusses benchmark contamination of pretraining corpora in Section 4.2. The authors also adopt a more aggressive N-gram matching method for contamination detection.

  3. Data Contamination: From Memorization to Exploitation (ACL 2022 Short)
    Inbal Magar, Roy Schwartz [paper]

    Abstract Pretrained language models are typically trained on massive web-based datasets, which are often "contaminated" with downstream test sets. It is not clear to what extent models exploit the contaminated data for downstream tasks. We present a principled method to study this question. We pretrain BERT models on joint corpora of Wikipedia and labeled downstream datasets, and fine-tune them on the relevant task. Comparing performance between samples seen and unseen during pretraining enables us to define and quantify levels of memorization and exploitation. Experiments with two models and three downstream tasks show that exploitation exists in some cases, but in others the models memorize the contaminated data, but do not exploit it. We show that these two measures are affected by different factors such as the number of duplications of the contaminated data and the model size. Our results highlight the importance of analyzing massive web-scale datasets to verify that progress in NLP is obtained by better language understanding and not better data exploitation.

  4. Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (TMLR 2023)
    Percy Liang, Rishi Bommasani, Tony Lee, Dimitris Tsipras, Dilara Soylu, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yian Zhang, Deepak Narayanan, Yuhuai Wu, Ananya Kumar, Benjamin Newman, Binhang Yuan, Bobby Yan, Ce Zhang, Christian Cosgrove, Christopher D. Manning, Christopher Ré, Diana Acosta-Navas, Drew A. Hudson, Eric Zelikman, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Frieda Rong, Hongyu Ren, Huaxiu Yao, Jue Wang, Keshav Santhanam, Laurel Orr, Lucia Zheng, Mert Yuksekgonul, Mirac Suzgun, Nathan Kim, Neel Guha, Niladri Chatterji, Omar Khattab, Peter Henderson, Qian Huang, Ryan Chi, Sang Michael Xie, Shibani Santurkar, Surya Ganguli, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Thomas Icard, Tianyi Zhang, Vishrav Chaudhary, William Wang, Xuechen Li, Yifan Mai, Yuhui Zhang, Yuta Koreeda [paper] [code] [website]

    Abstract Language models (LMs) are becoming the foundation for almost all major language technologies, but their capabilities, limitations, and risks are not well understood. We present Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) to improve the transparency of language models. First, we taxonomize the vast space of potential scenarios (i.e. use cases) and metrics (i.e. desiderata) that are of interest for LMs. Then we select a broad subset based on coverage and feasibility, noting what's missing or underrepresented (e.g. question answering for neglected English dialects, metrics for trustworthiness). Second, we adopt a multi-metric approach: We measure 7 metrics (accuracy, calibration, robustness, fairness, bias, toxicity, and efficiency) for each of 16 core scenarios when possible (87.5% of the time). This ensures metrics beyond accuracy don't fall to the wayside, and that trade-offs are clearly exposed. We also perform 7 targeted evaluations, based on 26 targeted scenarios, to analyze specific aspects (e.g. reasoning, disinformation). Third, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of 30 prominent language models (spanning open, limited-access, and closed models) on all 42 scenarios, 21 of which were not previously used in mainstream LM evaluation. Prior to HELM, models on average were evaluated on just 17.9% of the core HELM scenarios, with some prominent models not sharing a single scenario in common. We improve this to 96.0%: now all 30 models have been densely benchmarked on the same core scenarios and metrics under standardized conditions. Our evaluation surfaces 25 top-level findings. For full transparency, we release all raw model prompts and completions publicly for further analysis, as well as a general modular toolkit. We intend for HELM to be a living benchmark for the community, continuously updated with new scenarios, metrics, and models.

    This paper is not all about data contamination. It documents known evidence of contamination when possible (Appendix G).

  5. Can we trust the evaluation on ChatGPT? (TrustNLP 2023)
    Rachith Aiyappa, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Yong-Yeol Ahn [paper]

    Abstract ChatGPT, the first large language model (LLM) with mass adoption, has demonstrated remarkable performance in numerous natural language tasks. Despite its evident usefulness, evaluating ChatGPT's performance in diverse problem domains remains challenging due to the closed nature of the model and its continuous updates via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We highlight the issue of data contamination in ChatGPT evaluations, with a case study of the task of stance detection. We discuss the challenge of preventing data contamination and ensuring fair model evaluation in the age of closed and continuously trained models.

  6. Koala: An Index for Quantifying Overlaps with Pre-training Corpora (EMNLP 2023 Demo)
    Thuy-Trang Vu, Xuanli He, Gholamreza Haffari, Ehsan Shareghi [paper]

    Abstract In very recent years more attention has been placed on probing the role of pre-training data in Large Language Models (LLMs) downstream behaviour. Despite the importance, there is no public tool that supports such analysis of pre-training corpora at large scale. To help research in this space, we launch Koala, a searchable index over large pre-training corpora using lossless compressed suffix arrays with highly efficient compression rate and search support. In its first release we index the public proportion of OPT 175B, GPT-3, GPT-Neo, GPT-Neo, LLaMA, BERT, ELECTRA, RoBERTA, XLNet pre-training corpora. Koala provides a framework to do forensic analysis on the current and future benchmarks as well as to assess the degree of memorization in the output from the LLMs. Koala is available for public use at https://koala-index.erc.monash.edu/.

  7. Stop Uploading Test Data in Plain Text: Practical Strategies for Mitigating Data Contamination by Evaluation Benchmarks (EMNLP 2023)
    Alon Jacovi, Avi Caciularu, Omer Goldman, Yoav Goldberg [paper]

    Abstract Data contamination has become prevalent and challenging with the rise of models pretrained on large automatically-crawled corpora. For closed models, the training data becomes a trade secret, and even for open models, it is not trivial to detect contamination. Strategies such as leaderboards with hidden answers, or using test data which is guaranteed to be unseen, are expensive and become fragile with time. Assuming that all relevant actors value clean test data and will cooperate to mitigate data contamination, what can be done? We propose three strategies that can make a difference: (1) Test data made public should be encrypted with a public key and licensed to disallow derivative distribution; (2) demand training exclusion controls from closed API holders, and protect your test data by refusing to evaluate without them; (3) avoid data which appears with its solution on the internet, and release the web-page context of internet-derived data along with the data. These strategies are practical and can be effective in preventing data contamination.

  8. Benchmarking Foundation Models with Language-Model-as-an-Examiner (NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks)
    Yushi Bai, Jiahao Ying, Yixin Cao, Xin Lv, Yuze He, Xiaozhi Wang, Jifan Yu, Kaisheng Zeng, Yijia Xiao, Haozhe Lyu, Jiayin Zhang, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou [paper] [data]

    Abstract Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the performance of foundation models on open-ended question answering, which serves as a comprehensive test of a model's ability to understand and generate language in a manner similar to humans. Most of these works focus on proposing new datasets, however, we see two main issues within previous benchmarking pipelines, namely testing leakage and evaluation automation. In this paper, we propose a novel benchmarking framework, Language-Model-as-an-Examiner, where the LM serves as a knowledgeable examiner that formulates questions based on its knowledge and evaluates responses in a reference-free manner. Our framework allows for effortless extensibility as various LMs can be adopted as the examiner, and the questions can be constantly updated given more diverse trigger topics. For a more comprehensive and equitable evaluation, we devise three strategies: (1) We instruct the LM examiner to generate questions across a multitude of domains to probe for a broad acquisition, and raise follow-up questions to engage in a more in-depth assessment. (2) Upon evaluation, the examiner combines both scoring and ranking measurements, providing a reliable result as it aligns closely with human annotations. (3) We additionally propose a decentralized Peer-examination method to address the biases in a single examiner. Our data and benchmarking results are available at: https://lmexam.com/.

  9. CLEVA: Chinese Language Models EVAluation Platform (EMNLP 2023 Demo)
    Yanyang Li, Jianqiao Zhao, Duo Zheng, Zi-Yuan Hu, Zhi Chen, Xiaohui Su, Yongfeng Huang, Shijia Huang, Dahua Lin, Michael Lyu, Liwei Wang [paper] [dataset] [website]

    Abstract With the continuous emergence of Chinese Large Language Models (LLMs), how to evaluate a model's capabilities has become an increasingly significant issue. The absence of a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that thoroughly assesses a model's performance, the unstandardized and incomparable prompting procedure, and the prevalent risk of contamination pose major challenges in the current evaluation of Chinese LLMs. We present CLEVA, a user-friendly platform crafted to holistically evaluate Chinese LLMs. Our platform employs a standardized workflow to assess LLMs' performance across various dimensions, regularly updating a competitive leaderboard. To alleviate contamination, CLEVA curates a significant proportion of new data and develops a sampling strategy that guarantees a unique subset for each leaderboard round. Empowered by an easy-to-use interface that requires just a few mouse clicks and a model API, users can conduct a thorough evaluation with minimal coding. Large-scale experiments featuring 23 Chinese LLMs have validated CLEVA's efficacy.

    This paper is not all about data contamination. It presents methods for alleviating the contamination issue from both the benchmark construction and leaderboard maintenance perspectives.

  10. Time Travel in LLMs: Tracing Data Contamination in Large Language Models (ICLR 2024)
    Shahriar Golchin, Mihai Surdeanu [paper] [code]

    Abstract Data contamination, i.e., the presence of test data from downstream tasks in the training data of large language models (LLMs), is a potential major issue in measuring LLMs' real effectiveness on other tasks. We propose a straightforward yet effective method for identifying data contamination within LLMs. At its core, our approach starts by identifying potential contamination at the instance level; using this information, our approach then assesses wider contamination at the partition level. To estimate contamination of individual instances, we employ "guided instruction:" a prompt consisting of the dataset name, partition type, and the random-length initial segment of a reference instance, asking the LLM to complete it. An instance is flagged as contaminated if the LLM's output either exactly or nearly matches the latter segment of the reference. To understand if an entire partition is contaminated, we propose two ideas. The first idea marks a dataset partition as contaminated if the average overlap score with the reference instances (as measured by ROUGE-L or BLEURT) is statistically significantly better with the completions from guided instruction compared to a "general instruction" that does not include the dataset and partition name. The second idea marks a dataset partition as contaminated if a classifier based on GPT-4 with few-shot in-context learning prompt marks multiple generated completions as exact/near-exact matches of the corresponding reference instances. Our best method achieves an accuracy between 92% and 100% in detecting if an LLM is contaminated with seven datasets, containing train and test/validation partitions, when contrasted with manual evaluation by human experts. Further, our findings indicate that GPT-4 is contaminated with AG News, WNLI, and XSum datasets.

  11. Estimating Contamination via Perplexity: Quantifying Memorisation in Language Model Evaluation (arXiv, 19 Sep 2023)
    Yucheng Li [paper]

    Abstract Data contamination in model evaluation is getting increasingly prevalent as the massive training corpora of large language models often unintentionally include benchmark samples. Therefore, contamination analysis has became an inevitable part of reliable model evaluation. However, existing method of contamination analysis requires the access of the entire training data which is often confidential for recent models. This prevent the community to rigorously audit these models and conduct accurate assessment of their capability. In this paper, we propose a novel method to quantify contamination without the access of the full training set, that measure the extent of contamination with perplexity. Our analysis provides evidence of significant memorisation of recent foundation models in popular reading comprehension, summarisation benchmarks, while multiple choice appears less contaminated.

  12. DyVal: Graph-informed Dynamic Evaluation of Large Language Models (ICLR 2024)
    Kaijie Zhu, Jiaao Chen, Jindong Wang, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Diyi Yang, Xing Xie [paper] [code]

    Abstract Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in various evaluation benchmarks. However, concerns about their performance are raised on potential data contamination in their considerable volume of training corpus. Moreover, the static nature and fixed complexity of current benchmarks may inadequately gauge the advancing capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce DyVal, a novel, general, and flexible evaluation protocol for dynamic evaluation of LLMs. Based on our proposed dynamic evaluation framework, we build graph-informed DyVal by leveraging the structural advantage of directed acyclic graphs to dynamically generate evaluation samples with controllable complexities. DyVal generates challenging evaluation sets on reasoning tasks including mathematics, logical reasoning, and algorithm problems. We evaluate various LLMs ranging from Flan-T5-large to ChatGPT and GPT4. Experiments demonstrate that LLMs perform worse in DyVal-generated evaluation samples with different complexities, emphasizing the significance of dynamic evaluation. We also analyze the failure cases and results of different prompting methods. Moreover, DyVal-generated samples are not only evaluation sets, but also helpful data for fine-tuning to improve the performance of LLMs on existing benchmarks. We hope that DyVal can shed light on the future evaluation research of LLMs.

  13. To the Cutoff... and Beyond? A Longitudinal Perspective on LLM Data Contamination (ICLR 2024)
    Manley Roberts, Himanshu Thakur, Christine Herlihy, Colin White, Samuel Dooley [paper]

    Abstract Recent claims about the impressive abilities of large language models (LLMs) are often supported by evaluating publicly available benchmarks. Since LLMs train on wide swaths of the internet, this practice raises concerns of data contamination, i.e., evaluating on examples that are explicitly or implicitly included in the training data. Data contamination remains notoriously challenging to measure and mitigate, even with partial attempts like controlled experimentation of training data, canary strings, or embedding similarities. In this work, we conduct the first thorough longitudinal analysis of data contamination in LLMs by using the natural experiment of training cutoffs in GPT models to look at benchmarks released over time. Specifically, we consider two code/mathematical problem-solving datasets, Codeforces and Project Euler, and find statistically significant trends among LLM pass rate vs. GitHub popularity and release date that provide strong evidence of contamination. By open-sourcing our dataset, raw results, and evaluation framework, our work paves the way for rigorous analyses of data contamination in modern models. We conclude with a discussion of best practices and future steps for publicly releasing benchmarks in the age of LLMs that train on webscale data.

  14. S3Eval: A Synthetic, Scalable, Systematic Evaluation Suite for Large Language Models (arXiv, 23 Oct 2023)
    Fangyu Lei, Qian Liu, Yiming Huang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu [paper] [code]

    Abstract The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to great strides in model capabilities like reasoning and long-context understanding. However, as LLMs are able to process longer contexts, it becomes more challenging to evaluate whether they have acquired certain capabilities, since the length of text (e.g., 100K tokens) they can process far exceeds what humans can reliably assess in a reasonable duration. In this paper, we propose using complex synthetic tasks as a proxy evaluation method, and present S3Eval, a Synthetic, Scalable, Systematic evaluation suite for LLMs evaluation. As a synthetic benchmark, S3Eval enables the creation of any number of evaluation examples that are theoretically invisible to LLMs, mitigating the test set contamination issue. The synthetic nature of S3Eval provides users full control over the dataset, allowing them to systematically probe LLM capabilities by scaling text length and varying task difficulty across diverse scenarios. The strong correlation between S3Eval performance and scores of real-world benchmarks like Big-Bench Hard (BBH) demonstrates the soundness of using S3Eval for evaluation of LLMs. The in-depth analysis also uncover additional insights, including performance drop when the answer is sparsely distributed or located in the middle context, as well as some counter-intuitive trends of model performance.

  15. Detecting Pretraining Data from Large Language Models (ICLR 2024)
    Weijia Shi, Anirudh Ajith, Mengzhou Xia, Yangsibo Huang, Daogao Liu, Terra Blevins, Danqi Chen, Luke Zettlemoyer [paper] [code] [dataset] [website]

    Abstract Although large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed, the data used to train them is rarely disclosed. Given the incredible scale of this data, up to trillions of tokens, it is all but certain that it includes potentially problematic text such as copyrighted materials, personally identifiable information, and test data for widely reported reference benchmarks. However, we currently have no way to know which data of these types is included or in what proportions. In this paper, we study the pretraining data detection problem: given a piece of text and black-box access to an LLM without knowing the pretraining data, can we determine if the model was trained on the provided text? To facilitate this study, we introduce a dynamic benchmark WIKIMIA that uses data created before and after model training to support gold truth detection. We also introduce a new detection method Min-K% Prob based on a simple hypothesis: an unseen example is likely to contain a few outlier words with low probabilities under the LLM, while a seen example is less likely to have words with such low probabilities. Min-K% Prob can be applied without any knowledge about the pretraining corpus or any additional training, departing from previous detection methods that require training a reference model on data that is similar to the pretraining data. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate that Min-K% Prob achieves a 7.4% improvement on WIKIMIA over these previous methods. We apply Min-K% Prob to three real-world scenarios, copyrighted book detection, contaminated downstream example detection and privacy auditing of machine unlearning, and find it a consistently effective solution.

  16. Proving Test Set Contamination in Black Box Language Models (ICLR 2024)
    Yonatan Oren, Nicole Meister, Niladri Chatterji, Faisal Ladhak, Tatsunori B. Hashimoto [paper] [code]

    Abstract Large language models are trained on vast amounts of internet data, prompting concerns and speculation that they have memorized public benchmarks. Going from speculation to proof of contamination is challenging, as the pretraining data used by proprietary models are often not publicly accessible. We show that it is possible to provide provable guarantees of test set contamination in language models without access to pretraining data or model weights. Our approach leverages the fact that when there is no data contamination, all orderings of an exchangeable benchmark should be equally likely. In contrast, the tendency for language models to memorize example order means that a contaminated language model will find certain canonical orderings to be much more likely than others. Our test flags potential contamination whenever the likelihood of a canonically ordered benchmark dataset is significantly higher than the likelihood after shuffling the examples. We demonstrate that our procedure is sensitive enough to reliably prove test set contamination in challenging situations, including models as small as 1.4 billion parameters, on small test sets of only 1000 examples, and datasets that appear only a few times in the pretraining corpus. Using our test, we audit five popular publicly accessible language models for test set contamination and find little evidence for pervasive contamination.

  17. An Open Source Data Contamination Report for Large Language Models (arXiv, 26 Oct 2023)
    Yucheng Li [paper] [code]

    Abstract Data contamination in language model evaluation is increasingly prevalent as the popularity of large language models. It allows models to "cheat" via memorisation instead of displaying true capabilities. Therefore, contamination analysis has became an crucial part of reliable model evaluation to validate results. However, existing contamination analysis is usually conducted internally by LLM developers and often lacks transparency and completeness. This paper present an open source data contamination reports for the Llama series models. We analyse six popular multi-choice QA benchmarks and quantify their overlapping with the training set of Llama. Various levels of contamination ranging from 1\% to 8.7\% are found across benchmarks. Our comparison also reveals that Llama models can gain over 5\% higher accuracy on contaminated subsets versus clean subsets. Data and code are available at: https://github.com/liyucheng09/Contamination_Detector.

  18. Skywork: A More Open Bilingual Foundation Model (arXiv, 30 Oct 2023)
    Tianwen Wei, Liang Zhao, Lichang Zhang, Bo Zhu, Lijie Wang, Haihua Yang, Biye Li, Cheng Cheng, Weiwei Lü, Rui Hu, Chenxia Li, Liu Yang, Xilin Luo, Xuejie Wu, Lunan Liu, Wenjun Cheng, Peng Cheng, Jianhao Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Lei Lin, Xiaokun Wang, Yutuan Ma, Chuanhai Dong, Yanqi Sun, Yifu Chen, Yongyi Peng, Xiaojuan Liang, Shuicheng Yan, Han Fang, Yahui Zhou [paper] [dataset]

    Abstract In this technical report, we present Skywork-13B, a family of large language models (LLMs) trained on a corpus of over 3.2 trillion tokens drawn from both English and Chinese texts. This bilingual foundation model is the most extensively trained and openly published LLMs of comparable size to date. We introduce a two-stage training methodology using a segmented corpus, targeting general purpose training and then domain-specific enhancement training, respectively. We show that our model not only excels on popular benchmarks, but also achieves \emph{state of the art} performance in Chinese language modeling on diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a novel leakage detection method, demonstrating that test data contamination is a pressing issue warranting further investigation by the LLM community. To spur future research, we release Skywork-13B along with checkpoints obtained during intermediate stages of the training process. We are also releasing part of our SkyPile corpus, a collection of over 150 billion tokens of web text, which is the largest high quality open Chinese pre-training corpus to date. We hope Skywork-13B and our open corpus will serve as a valuable open-source resource to democratize access to high-quality LLMs.

    This paper is not all about data contamination. It releases a new dataset augmented from GSM8K to detect the contamination risk of other models in GSM8K (Section 5).

  19. NLP Evaluation in trouble: On the Need to Measure LLM Data Contamination for each Benchmark (EMNLP 2023 Findings)
    Oscar Sainz, Jon Ander Campos, Iker García-Ferrero, Julen Etxaniz, Oier Lopez de Lacalle, Eneko Agirre [paper] [code] [website]

    Abstract In this position paper we argue that the classical evaluation on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using annotated benchmarks is in trouble. The worst kind of data contamination happens when a Large Language Model (LLM) is trained on the test split of a benchmark, and then evaluated in the same benchmark. The extent of the problem is unknown, as it is not straightforward to measure. Contamination causes an overestimation of the performance of a contaminated model in a target benchmark and associated task with respect to their non-contaminated counterparts. The consequences can be very harmful, with wrong scientific conclusions being published while other correct ones are discarded. This position paper defines different levels of data contamination and argues for a community effort, including the development of automatic and semi-automatic measures to detect when data from a benchmark was exposed to a model, and suggestions for flagging papers with conclusions that are compromised by data contamination.

  20. Don't Make Your LLM an Evaluation Benchmark Cheater (arXiv, 3 Nov 2023)
    Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Zhipeng Chen, Wentong Chen, Wayne Xin Zhao, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Ji-Rong Wen, Jiawei Han [paper]

    Abstract Large language models~(LLMs) have greatly advanced the frontiers of artificial intelligence, attaining remarkable improvement in model capacity. To assess the model performance, a typical approach is to construct evaluation benchmarks for measuring the ability level of LLMs in different aspects. Despite that a number of high-quality benchmarks have been released, the concerns about the appropriate use of these benchmarks and the fair comparison of different models are increasingly growing. Considering these concerns, in this paper, we discuss the potential risk and impact of inappropriately using evaluation benchmarks and misleadingly interpreting the evaluation results. Specially, we focus on a special issue that would lead to inappropriate evaluation, \ie \emph{benchmark leakage}, referring that the data related to evaluation sets is occasionally used for model training. This phenomenon now becomes more common since pre-training data is often prepared ahead of model test. We conduct extensive experiments to study the effect of benchmark leverage, and find that it can dramatically boost the evaluation results, which would finally lead to an unreliable assessment of model performance. To improve the use of existing evaluation benchmarks, we finally present several guidelines for both LLM developers and benchmark maintainers. We hope this work can draw attention to appropriate training and evaluation of LLMs.

  21. Rethinking Benchmark and Contamination for Language Models with Rephrased Samples (arXiv, 8 Nov 2023)
    Shuo Yang, Wei-Lin Chiang, Lianmin Zheng, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica [paper] [code]

    Abstract Large language models are increasingly trained on all the data ever produced by humans. Many have raised concerns about the trustworthiness of public benchmarks due to potential contamination in pre-training or fine-tuning datasets. While most data decontamination efforts apply string matching (e.g., n-gram overlap) to remove benchmark data, we show that these methods are insufficient, and simple variations of test data (e.g., paraphrasing, translation) can easily bypass these decontamination measures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that if such variation of test data is not eliminated, a 13B model can easily overfit a test benchmark and achieve drastically high performance, on par with GPT-4. We validate such observations in widely used benchmarks such as MMLU, GSK8k, and HumanEval. To address this growing risk, we propose a stronger LLM-based decontamination method and apply it to widely used pre-training and fine-tuning datasets, revealing significant previously unknown test overlap. For example, in pre-training sets such as RedPajama-Data-1T and StarCoder-Data, we identified that 8-18\% of the HumanEval benchmark overlaps. Interestingly, we also find such contamination in synthetic dataset generated by GPT-3.5/4, suggesting a potential risk of unintentional contamination. We urge the community to adopt stronger decontamination approaches when using public benchmarks. Moreover, we call for the community to actively develop fresh one-time exams to evaluate models accurately. Our decontamination tool is publicly available at https://github.com/lm-sys/llm-decontaminator.

  22. Data Contamination Quiz: A Tool to Detect and Estimate Contamination in Large Language Models (arXiv, 10 Nov 2023)
    Shahriar Golchin, Mihai Surdeanu [paper]

    Abstract We propose the Data Contamination Quiz, a simple and effective approach to detect data contamination in large language models (LLMs) and estimate the amount of it. Specifically, we frame data contamination detection as a series of multiple-choice questions. We devise a quiz format wherein three perturbed versions of each dataset instance are created. These changes only include word-level perturbations, replacing words with their contextual synonyms, ensuring both the semantic and sentence structure remain exactly the same as the original instance. Together with the original instance, these perturbed versions constitute the choices in the quiz. Given that the only distinguishing signal among these choices is the exact wording, an LLM, when tasked with identifying the original instance from the choices, opts for the original if it has memorized it in its pre-training phase--a trait intrinsic to LLMs. A dataset partition is then marked as contaminated if the LLM's performance on the quiz surpasses what random chance suggests. Our evaluation spans seven datasets and their respective splits (train and test/validation) on two state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. While lacking access to the pre-training data, our results suggest that our approach not only enhances the detection of data contamination but also provides an accurate estimation of its extent, even when the contamination signal is weak.

  23. Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models (arXiv, 16 Nov 2023)
    Chunyuan Deng, Yilun Zhao, Xiangru Tang, Mark Gerstein, Arman Cohan [paper]

    Abstract Recent observations have underscored a disparity between the inflated benchmark scores and the actual performance of LLMs, raising concerns about potential contamination of evaluation benchmarks. This issue is especially critical for closed-source models and certain open-source models where training data transparency is lacking. In this paper we study data contamination by proposing two methods tailored for both open-source and proprietary LLMs. We first introduce a retrieval-based system to explore potential overlaps between evaluation benchmarks and pretraining corpora. We further present a novel investigation protocol named \textbf{T}estset \textbf{S}lot Guessing (\textit{TS-Guessing}), applicable to both open and proprietary models. This approach entails masking a wrong answer in a multiple-choice question and prompting the model to fill in the gap. Additionally, it involves obscuring an unlikely word in an evaluation example and asking the model to produce it. We find that certain commercial LLMs could surprisingly guess the missing option in various test sets. Specifically, in the TruthfulQA benchmark, we find that LLMs exhibit notable performance improvement when provided with additional metadata in the benchmark. Further, in the MMLU benchmark, ChatGPT and GPT-4 demonstrated an exact match rate of 52\% and 57\%, respectively, in guessing the missing options in benchmark test data. We hope these results underscore the need for more robust evaluation methodologies and benchmarks in the field.

  24. LatestEval: Addressing Data Contamination in Language Model Evaluation through Dynamic and Time-Sensitive Test Construction (AAAI 2024)
    Yucheng Li, Frank Guerin, Chenghua Lin [paper] [code]

    Abstract Data contamination in evaluation is getting increasingly prevalent with the emergence of language models pre-trained on super large, automatically crawled corpora. This problem leads to significant challenges in the accurate assessment of model capabilities and generalisations. In this paper, we propose LatestEval, an automatic method that leverages the most recent texts to create uncontaminated reading comprehension evaluations. LatestEval avoids data contamination by only using texts published within a recent time window, ensuring no overlap with the training corpora of pre-trained language models. We develop the LatestEval automated pipeline to 1) gather the latest texts; 2) identify key information, and 3) construct questions targeting the information while removing the existing answers from the context. This encourages models to infer the answers themselves based on the remaining context, rather than just copy-paste. Our experiments demonstrate that language models exhibit negligible memorisation behaviours on LatestEval as opposed to previous benchmarks, suggesting a significantly reduced risk of data contamination and leading to a more robust evaluation. Data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/liyucheng09/LatestEval.

  25. NPHardEval: Dynamic Benchmark on Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models via Complexity Classes (arXiv, 22 Dec 2023)
    Lizhou Fan, Wenyue Hua, Lingyao Li, Haoyang Ling, Yongfeng Zhang [paper] [code]

    Abstract Complex reasoning ability is one of the most important features of current LLMs, which has also been leveraged to play an integral role in complex decision-making tasks. Therefore, the investigation into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical: numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the reasoning abilities of LLMs. However, current benchmarks are inadequate in offering a rigorous evaluation of the full extent of reasoning abilities that LLMs are capable of achieving. They are also prone to the risk of overfitting, as these benchmarks, being publicly accessible and static, allow models to potentially tailor their responses to specific benchmark metrics, thereby inflating their performance. Addressing these limitations, our research introduces a new benchmark, named NPHardEval. This benchmark is designed to evaluate the reasoning abilities of LLMs across a broad spectrum of 900 algorithmic questions, extending up to the NP-Hard complexity class. These questions are meticulously chosen to represent a wide range of complexity class below the NP-hard complexity class, offering a rigorous measure of the reasoning ability of LLMs. Through this study, we shed light on the current state of reasoning in LLMs, providing an objective and rigorous perspective through the comparison of LLMs' performance across complex classes. Moreover, this benchmark is designed with a dynamic update mechanism, where the datapoints are refreshed on a monthly basis. Such regular updates play a crucial role in mitigating the risk of LLMs overfitting to the benchmark, promoting a more accurate and reliable assessment of their reasoning capabilities. The benchmark dataset and code of NPHardEval are available at this https URL.

  26. Task Contamination: Language Models May Not Be Few-Shot Anymore (AAAI 2024)
    Changmao Li, Jeffrey Flanigan [paper]

    Abstract Large language models (LLMs) offer impressive performance in various zero-shot and few-shot tasks. However, their success in zero-shot and few-shot settings may be affected by task contamination, a potential limitation that has not been thoroughly examined. This paper investigates how zero-shot and few-shot performance of LLMs has changed chronologically over time. Utilizing GPT-3 series models and several other recent open-sourced LLMs, and controlling for dataset difficulty, we find that on datasets released before the LLM training data creation date, LLMs perform surprisingly better than on datasets released after. This strongly indicates that, for many LLMs, there exists task contamination on zero-shot and few-shot evaluation for datasets released prior to the LLMs' training data creation date. Additionally, we utilize training data inspection, task example extraction, and a membership inference attack, which reveal further evidence of task contamination. Importantly, we find that for classification tasks with no possibility of task contamination, LLMs rarely demonstrate statistically significant improvements over simple majority baselines, in both zero and few-shot settings.

  27. Investigating Data Contamination for Pre-training Language Models (arXiv, 11 Jan 2024)
    Minhao Jiang, Ken Ziyu Liu, Ming Zhong, Rylan Schaeffer, Siru Ouyang, Jiawei Han, Sanmi Koyejo [paper]

    Abstract Language models pre-trained on web-scale corpora demonstrate impressive capabilities on diverse downstream tasks. However, there is increasing concern whether such capabilities might arise from evaluation datasets being included in the pre-training corpus -- a phenomenon known as \textit{data contamination} -- in a manner that artificially increases performance. There has been little understanding of how this potential contamination might influence LMs' performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we explore the impact of data contamination at the pre-training stage by pre-training a series of GPT-2 models \textit{from scratch}. We highlight the effect of both text contamination (\textit{i.e.}\ input text of the evaluation samples) and ground-truth contamination (\textit{i.e.}\ the prompts asked on the input and the desired outputs) from evaluation data. We also investigate the effects of repeating contamination for various downstream tasks. Additionally, we examine the prevailing n-gram-based definitions of contamination within current LLM reports, pinpointing their limitations and inadequacy. Our findings offer new insights into data contamination's effects on language model capabilities and underscore the need for independent, comprehensive contamination assessments in LLM studies.

  28. DE-COP: Detecting Copyrighted Content in Language Models Training Data (ICML 2024)
    André V. Duarte, Xuandong Zhao, Arlindo L. Oliveira, Lei Li [paper] [code] [data1] [data2]

    Abstract How can we detect if copyrighted content was used in the training process of a language model, considering that the training data is typically undisclosed? We are motivated by the premise that a language model is likely to identify verbatim excerpts from its training text. We propose DE-COP, a method to determine whether a piece of copyrighted content was included in training. DE-COP's core approach is to probe an LLM with multiple-choice questions, whose options include both verbatim text and their paraphrases. We construct BookTection, a benchmark with excerpts from 165 books published prior and subsequent to a model's training cutoff, along with their paraphrases. Our experiments show that DE-COP surpasses the prior best method by 9.6% in detection performance (AUC) on models with logits available. Moreover, DE-COP also achieves an average accuracy of 72% for detecting suspect books on fully black-box models where prior methods give approximately 4% accuracy. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/DE-COP

  29. Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs (arXiv, 6 Feb 2024)
    Simone Balloccu, Patrícia Schmidtová, Mateusz Lango, Ondřej Dušek [paper] [website]

    Abstract Natural Language Processing (NLP) research is increasingly focusing on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), with some of the most popular ones being either fully or partially closed-source. The lack of access to model details, especially regarding training data, has repeatedly raised concerns about data contamination among researchers. Several attempts have been made to address this issue, but they are limited to anecdotal evidence and trial and error. Additionally, they overlook the problem of \emph{indirect} data leaking, where models are iteratively improved by using data coming from users. In this work, we conduct the first systematic analysis of work using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the most prominently used LLMs today, in the context of data contamination. By analysing 255 papers and considering OpenAI's data usage policy, we extensively document the amount of data leaked to these models during the first year after the model's release. We report that these models have been globally exposed to ∼4.7M samples from 263 benchmarks. At the same time, we document a number of evaluation malpractices emerging in the reviewed papers, such as unfair or missing baseline comparisons and reproducibility issues. We release our results as a collaborative project on https://leak-llm.github.io/, where other researchers can contribute to our efforts.

  30. Investigating the Impact of Data Contamination of Large Language Models in Text-to-SQL Translation (Findings of ACL 2024)
    Federico Ranaldi, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Dario Onorati, Leonardo Ranaldi, Cristina Giannone, Andrea Favalli, Raniero Romagnoli, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto [paper]

    Abstract Understanding textual description to generate code seems to be an achieved capability of instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) in zero-shot scenario. However, there is a severe possibility that this translation ability may be influenced by having seen target textual descriptions and the related code. This effect is known as Data Contamination. In this study, we investigate the impact of Data Contamination on the performance of GPT-3.5 in the Text-to-SQL code-generating tasks. Hence, we introduce a novel method to detect Data Contamination in GPTs and examine GPT-3.5's Text-to-SQL performances using the known Spider Dataset and our new unfamiliar dataset Termite. Furthermore, we analyze GPT-3.5's efficacy on databases with modified information via an adversarial table disconnection (ATD) approach, complicating Text-to-SQL tasks by removing structural pieces of information from the database. Our results indicate a significant performance drop in GPT-3.5 on the unfamiliar Termite dataset, even with ATD modifications, highlighting the effect of Data Contamination on LLMs in Text-to-SQL translation tasks.

  31. Benchmark Self-Evolving: A Multi-Agent Framework for Dynamic LLM Evaluation (arXiv, 18 Feb 2024)
    Siyuan Wang, Zhuohan Long, Zhihao Fan, Zhongyu Wei, Xuanjing Huang [paper] [code]

    Abstract This paper presents a benchmark self-evolving framework to dynamically evaluate rapidly advancing Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming for a more accurate assessment of their capabilities and limitations. We utilize a multi-agent system to manipulate the context or question of original instances, reframing new evolving instances with high confidence that dynamically extend existing benchmarks. Towards a more scalable, robust and fine-grained evaluation, we implement six reframing operations to construct evolving instances testing LLMs against diverse queries, data noise and probing their problem-solving sub-abilities. With this framework, we extend benchmark datasets of four tasks. Experimental results show a general performance decline in most LLMs against their original results. This decline under our scalable and robust evaluations, alongside our fine-grained evaluation, more accurately reflect models' capabilities. Besides, our framework widens performance discrepancies both between different models and within the same model across various tasks, facilitating more informed model selection for specific tasks.

  32. Have Seen Me Before? Automating Dataset Updates Towards Reliable and Timely Evaluation (arXiv, 19 Feb 2024)
    Jiahao Ying, Yixin Cao, Bo Wang, Wei Tang, Yizhe Yang, Shuicheng Yan [paper]

    Abstract Due to the expanding capabilities and pre-training data, Large Language Models (LLMs) are facing increasingly serious evaluation challenges. On one hand, the data leakage issue cause over-estimation on existing benchmarks. On the other hand, periodically curating datasets manually is costly. In this paper, we propose to automate dataset updates for reliable and timely evaluation. The basic idea is to generate unseen and high-quality testing samples based on existing ones to mitigate leakage issues. In specific, we propose two strategies with systematically verification. First, the mimicking strategy employs LLMs to create new samples resembling existing ones, to the maximum extent preserving the stylistic of the original dataset. Our experiments demonstrate its evaluation stability across multiple instantiations and its effectiveness in dealing with data leakage issues in most cases. Second, for the cases that mimicking dataset works poorly, we design an extending strategy that adjusts the difficulty of the generated samples according to varying cognitive levels. This not only makes our evaluation more systematic, but also, with a balanced difficulty, even discern model capabilities better at fine-grained levels.

  33. TreeEval: Benchmark-Free Evaluation of Large Language Models through Tree Planning (arXiv, 20 Feb 2024)
    Xiang Li, Yunshi Lan, Chao Yang [paper] [code]

    Abstract Recently, numerous new benchmarks have been established to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) via either computing a holistic score or employing another LLM as a judge. However, these approaches suffer from data leakage due to the open access of the benchmark and inflexible evaluation process. To address this issue, we introduce TreeEval, a benchmark-free evaluation method for LLMs that let a high-performance LLM host an irreproducible evaluation session and essentially avoids the data leakage. Moreover, this LLM performs as an examiner to raise up a series of questions under a topic with a tree planing strategy, which considers the current evaluation status to decide the next question generation and ensures the completeness and efficiency of the evaluation process. We evaluate 6 models of different parameter sizes, including 7B, 13B, and 33B, and ultimately achieved the highest correlation coefficient with AlpacaEval2.0 using only around 45 questions. We also conduct more analysis to show the robustness and reliability of TreeEval. Our code can be accessed via the provided URL.

  34. DyVal 2: Dynamic Evaluation of Large Language Models by Meta Probing Agents (arXiv, 21 Feb 2024)
    Kaijie Zhu, Jindong Wang, Qinlin Zhao, Ruochen Xu, Xing Xie [paper]

    Abstract Evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has raised great concerns in the community due to the issue of data contamination. Existing work designed evaluation protocols using well-defined algorithms for specific tasks, which cannot be easily extended to diverse scenarios. Moreover, current evaluation benchmarks can only provide the overall benchmark results and cannot support a fine-grained and multifaceted analysis of LLMs' abilities. In this paper, we propose meta probing agents (MPA), a general dynamic evaluation protocol inspired by psychometrics to evaluate LLMs. MPA is the key component of DyVal 2, which naturally extends the previous DyVal~\citep{zhu2023dyval}. MPA designs the probing and judging agents to automatically transform an original evaluation problem into a new one following psychometric theory on three basic cognitive abilities: language understanding, problem solving, and domain knowledge. These basic abilities are also dynamically configurable, allowing multifaceted analysis. We conducted extensive evaluations using MPA and found that most LLMs achieve poorer performance, indicating room for improvement. Our multifaceted analysis demonstrated the strong correlation between the basic abilities and an implicit Matthew effect on model size, i.e., larger models possess stronger correlations of the abilities. MPA can also be used as a data augmentation approach to enhance LLMs.

  35. KIEval: A Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models (arXiv, 23 Feb 2024)
    Zhuohao Yu, Chang Gao, Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Wei Ye, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Yue Zhang, Shikun Zhang [paper]

    Abstract Automatic evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) are hindered by data contamination, leading to inflated assessments of their effectiveness. Existing strategies, which aim to detect contaminated texts, focus on quantifying contamination status instead of accurately gauging model performance. In this paper, we introduce KIEval, a Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation framework, which incorporates an LLM-powered "interactor" role for the first time to accomplish a dynamic contamination-resilient evaluation. Starting with a question in a conventional LLM benchmark involving domain-specific knowledge, KIEval utilizes dynamically generated, multi-round, and knowledge-focused dialogues to determine whether a model's response is merely a recall of benchmark answers or demonstrates a deep comprehension to apply knowledge in more complex conversations. Extensive experiments on seven leading LLMs across five datasets validate KIEval's effectiveness and generalization. We also reveal that data contamination brings no contribution or even negative effect to models' real-world applicability and understanding, and existing contamination detection methods for LLMs can only identify contamination in pre-training but not during supervised fine-tuning.

  36. Generalization or Memorization: Data Contamination and Trustworthy Evaluation for Large Language Models (Findings of ACL 2024)
    Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Huanyu Liu, Zhi Jin, Ge Li [paper]

    Abstract Recent statements about the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are usually supported by evaluating on open-access benchmarks. Considering the vast size and wide-ranging sources of LLMs' training data, it could explicitly or implicitly include test data, leading to LLMs being more susceptible to data contamination. However, due to the opacity of training data, the black-box access of models, and the rapid growth of synthetic training data, detecting and mitigating data contamination for LLMs faces significant challenges. In this paper, we propose CDD, which stands for Contamination Detection via output Distribution for LLMs. CDD necessitates only the sampled texts to detect data contamination, by identifying the peakedness of LLM's output distribution. To mitigate the impact of data contamination in evaluation, we also present TED: Trustworthy Evaluation via output Distribution, based on the correction of LLM's output distribution. To facilitate this study, we introduce two benchmarks, i.e., DetCon and ComiEval, for data contamination detection and contamination mitigation evaluation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that CDD achieves the average relative improvements of 21.8%-30.2% over other contamination detection approaches in terms of Accuracy, F1 Score, and AUC metrics, and can effectively detect contamination caused by the variants of test data. TED significantly mitigates performance improvements up to 66.9% attributed to data contamination across 24 settings and 21 contamination degrees. In real-world applications, we reveal that ChatGPT exhibits a high potential to suffer from data contamination on HumanEval benchmark.

  37. Private Benchmarking to Prevent Contamination and Improve Comparative Evaluation of LLMs (arXiv, 1 Mar 2024)
    Nishanth Chandran, Sunayana Sitaram, Divya Gupta, Rahul Sharma, Kashish Mittal, Manohar Swaminathan [paper]

    Abstract Benchmarking is the de-facto standard for evaluating LLMs, due to its speed, replicability and low cost. However, recent work has pointed out that the majority of the open source benchmarks available today have been contaminated or leaked into LLMs, meaning that LLMs have access to test data during pretraining and/or fine-tuning. This raises serious concerns about the validity of benchmarking studies conducted so far and the future of evaluation using benchmarks. To solve this problem, we propose Private Benchmarking, a solution where test datasets are kept private and models are evaluated without revealing the test data to the model. We describe various scenarios (depending on the trust placed on model owners or dataset owners), and present solutions to avoid data contamination using private benchmarking. For scenarios where the model weights need to be kept private, we describe solutions from confidential computing and cryptography that can aid in private benchmarking. Finally, we present solutions the problem of benchmark dataset auditing, to ensure that private benchmarks are of sufficiently high quality.

  38. NPHardEval4V: A Dynamic Reasoning Benchmark of Multimodal Large Language Models (arXiv, 4 Mar 2024)
    Lizhou Fan, Wenyue Hua, Xiang Li, Kaijie Zhu, Mingyu Jin, Lingyao Li, Haoyang Ling, Jinkui Chi, Jindong Wang, Xin Ma, Yongfeng Zhang [paper] [code]

    Abstract Understanding the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is an important area of research. In this study, we introduce a dynamic benchmark, NPHardEval4V, aimed at addressing the existing gaps in evaluating the pure reasoning abilities of MLLMs. Our benchmark aims to provide a venue to disentangle the effect of various factors such as image recognition and instruction following, from the overall performance of the models, allowing us to focus solely on evaluating their reasoning abilities. It is built by converting textual description of questions from NPHardEval to image representations. Our findings reveal significant discrepancies in reasoning abilities across different models and highlight the relatively weak performance of MLLMs compared to LLMs in terms of reasoning. We also investigate the impact of different prompting styles, including visual, text, and combined visual and text prompts, on the reasoning abilities of MLLMs, demonstrating the different impacts of multimodal inputs in model performance. Unlike traditional benchmarks, which focus primarily on static evaluations, our benchmark will be updated monthly to prevent overfitting and ensure a more authentic and fine-grained evaluation of the models. We believe that this benchmark can aid in understanding and guide the further development of reasoning abilities in MLLMs. The benchmark dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lizhouf/NPHardEval4V.

  39. Quantifying Contamination in Evaluating Code Generation Capabilities of Language Models (ACL 2024)
    Martin Riddell, Ansong Ni, Arman Cohan [paper]

    Abstract While large language models have achieved remarkable performance on various code generation benchmarks, there have been growing concerns regarding potential contamination of these benchmarks as they may be leaked into pretraining and finetuning data. While recent work has investigated contamination in natural language generation and understanding tasks, there has been less extensive research into how data contamination impacts the evaluation of code generation, which is critical for understanding the robustness and reliability of LLMs in programming contexts. In this work, we perform a comprehensive study of data contamination of popular code generation benchmarks, and precisely quantify their overlap with pretraining corpus through both surface-level and semantic-level matching. In our experiments, we show that there are substantial overlap between popular code generation benchmarks and open training corpus, and models perform significantly better on the subset of the benchmarks where similar solutions are seen during training. We also conduct extensive analysis on the factors that affects model memorization and generalization, such as model size, problem difficulty, and question length. We release all resulting files from our matching pipeline for future research.

  40. Elephants Never Forget: Testing Language Models for Memorization of Tabular Data (NeurIPS 2023 Second Table Representation Learning Workshop)
    Sebastian Bordt, Harsha Nori, Rich Caruana [paper] [code]

    Abstract While many have shown how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. In this work, we address this concern for tabular data. Starting with simple qualitative tests for whether an LLM knows the names and values of features, we introduce a variety of different techniques to assess the degrees of contamination, including statistical tests for conditional distribution modeling and four tests that identify memorization. Our investigation reveals that LLMs are pre-trained on many popular tabular datasets. This exposure can lead to invalid performance evaluation on downstream tasks because the LLMs have, in effect, been fit to the test set. Interestingly, we also identify a regime where the language model reproduces important statistics of the data, but fails to reproduce the dataset verbatim. On these datasets, although seen during training, good performance on downstream tasks might not be due to overfitting. Our findings underscore the need for ensuring data integrity in machine learning tasks with LLMs. To facilitate future research, we release an open-source tool that can perform various tests for memorization https://github.com/interpretml/LLM-Tabular-Memorization-Checker.

  41. LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code (arXiv, 12 Mar 2024)
    Naman Jain, King Han, Alex Gu, Wen-Ding Li, Fanjia Yan, Tianjun Zhang, Sida Wang, Armando Solar-Lezama, Koushik Sen, Ion Stoica [paper] [website] [data]

    Abstract Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to code-related applications have emerged as a prominent field, attracting significant interest from both academia and industry. However, as new and improved LLMs are developed, existing evaluation benchmarks (e.g., HumanEval, MBPP) are no longer sufficient for assessing their capabilities. In this work, we propose LiveCodeBench, a comprehensive and contamination-free evaluation of LLMs for code, which continuously collects new problems over time from contests across three competition platforms, namely LeetCode, AtCoder, and CodeForces. Notably, our benchmark also focuses on a broader range of code related capabilities, such as self-repair, code execution, and test output prediction, beyond just code generation. Currently, LiveCodeBench hosts four hundred high-quality coding problems that were published between May 2023 and February 2024. We have evaluated 9 base LLMs and 20 instruction-tuned LLMs on LiveCodeBench. We present empirical findings on contamination, holistic performance comparisons, potential overfitting in existing benchmarks as well as individual model comparisons. We will release all prompts and model completions for further community analysis, along with a general toolkit for adding new scenarios and model.

  42. KoLA: Carefully Benchmarking World Knowledge of Large Language Models (ICLR 2024)
    Jifan Yu, Xiaozhi Wang, Shangqing Tu, Shulin Cao, Daniel Zhang-Li, Xin Lv, Hao Peng, Zijun Yao, Xiaohan Zhang, Hanming Li, Chunyang Li, Zheyuan Zhang, Yushi Bai, Yantao Liu, Amy Xin, Kaifeng Yun, Linlu GONG, Nianyi Lin, Jianhui Chen, Zhili Wu, Yunjia Qi, Weikai Li, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Ji Qi, Hailong Jin, Jinxin Liu, Yu Gu, Yuan Yao, Ning Ding, Lei Hou, Zhiyuan Liu, Xu Bin, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li [paper] [website]

    Abstract The unprecedented performance of large language models (LLMs) necessitates improvements in evaluations. Rather than merely exploring the breadth of LLM abilities, we believe meticulous and thoughtful designs are essential to thorough, unbiased, and applicable evaluations. Given the importance of world knowledge to LLMs, we construct a Knowledge-oriented LLM Assessment benchmark (KoLA), in which we carefully design three crucial factors: (1) For ability modeling, we mimic human cognition to form a four-level taxonomy of knowledge-related abilities, covering 19 tasks. (2) For data, to ensure fair comparisons, we use both Wikipedia, a corpus prevalently pre-trained by LLMs, along with continuously collected emerging corpora, aiming to evaluate the capacity to handle unseen data and evolving knowledge. (3) For evaluation criteria, we adopt a contrastive system, including overall standard scores for better numerical comparability across tasks and models, and a unique self-contrast metric for automatically evaluating knowledge-creating ability. We evaluate 21 open-source and commercial LLMs and obtain some intriguing findings. The KoLA dataset will be updated every three months to provide timely references for developing LLMs and knowledge-related systems.

  43. Top Leaderboard Ranking = Top Coding Proficiency, Always? EvoEval: Evolving Coding Benchmarks via LLM (arXiv, 28 Mar 2024)
    Chunqiu Steven Xia, Yinlin Deng, Lingming Zhang [paper] [code]

    Abstract LLMs have become the go-to choice for code generation tasks, with an exponential increase in the training, development, and usage of LLMs specifically for code generation. To evaluate the ability of LLMs on code, both academic and industry practitioners rely on popular handcrafted benchmarks. However, prior benchmarks contain only a very limited set of problems, both in quantity and variety. Further, due to popularity and age, many benchmarks are prone to data leakage where example solutions can be readily found on the web and thus potentially in training data. Such limitations inevitably lead us to inquire: Is the leaderboard performance on existing benchmarks reliable and comprehensive enough to measure the program synthesis ability of LLMs? To address this, we introduce EvoEval -- a program synthesis benchmark suite created by evolving existing benchmarks into different targeted domains for a comprehensive evaluation of LLM coding abilities. Our study on 51 LLMs shows that compared to the high performance obtained on standard benchmarks like HumanEval, there is a significant drop in performance (on average 39.4%) when using EvoEval. Additionally, the decrease in performance can range from 19.6% to 47.7%, leading to drastic ranking changes amongst LLMs and showing potential overfitting of existing benchmarks. Furthermore, we showcase various insights, including the brittleness of instruction-following models when encountering rewording or subtle changes as well as the importance of learning problem composition and decomposition. EvoEval not only provides comprehensive benchmarks, but can be used to further evolve arbitrary problems to keep up with advances and the ever-changing landscape of LLMs for code. We have open-sourced our benchmarks, tools, and complete LLM generations at https://github.com/evo-eval/evoeval

  44. EvoCodeBench: An Evolving Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories (arXiv, 31 Mar 2024)
    Jia Li, Ge Li, Xuanming Zhang, Yihong Dong, Zhi Jin [paper] [code]

    Abstract How to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation is an open question. Existing benchmarks demonstrate poor alignment with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of LLMs. This paper proposes a new benchmark - EvoCodeBench to address the preceding problems, which has three primary advances. (1) EvoCodeBench aligns with real-world repositories in multiple dimensions, e.g., code distributions and dependency distributions. (2) EvoCodeBench offers comprehensive annotations (e.g., requirements, reference code, and reference dependencies), and robust evaluation metrics (e.g., Pass@k and Recall@k). (3) EvoCodeBench is an evolving benchmark to avoid data leakage. We build an automatic pipeline to update EvoCodeBench from the latest repositories. We release the first version - EvoCodeBench-2403, containing 275 samples from 25 real-world repositories. Based on EvoCodeBench, we propose repository-level code generation and evaluate 10 popular LLMs (e.g., gpt-4, gpt-3.5, DeepSeek Coder, StarCoder 2, CodeLLaMa, Gemma, and Qwen 1.5). Our experiments reveal the coding abilities of these LLMs in real-world repositories. For example, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-4 only is 20.73% in our experiments. We also analyze failed cases and summarize the shortcomings of existing LLMs in EvoCodeBench. We release EvoCodeBench, all prompts, and LLMs' completions for further community analysis.

  45. How Much are LLMs Contaminated? A Comprehensive Survey and the LLMSanitize Library (arXiv, 31 Mar 2024)
    Mathieu Ravaut, Bosheng Ding, Fangkai Jiao, Hailin Chen, Xingxuan Li, Ruochen Zhao, Chengwei Qin, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty [paper] [code]

    Abstract With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years, new opportunities are emerging, but also new challenges, and contamination is quickly becoming critical. Business applications and fundraising in AI have reached a scale at which a few percentage points gained on popular question-answering benchmarks could translate into dozens of millions of dollars, placing high pressure on model integrity. At the same time, it is becoming harder and harder to keep track of the data that LLMs have seen; if not impossible with closed-source models like GPT-4 and Claude-3 not divulging any information on the training set. As a result, contamination becomes a critical issue: LLMs' performance may not be reliable anymore, as the high performance may be at least partly due to their previous exposure to the data. This limitation jeopardizes the entire progress in the field of NLP, yet, there remains a lack of methods on how to efficiently address contamination, or a clear consensus on prevention, mitigation and classification of contamination. In this paper, we survey all recent work on contamination with LLMs, and help the community track contamination levels of LLMs by releasing an open-source Python library named LLMSanitize implementing major contamination detection algorithms, which link is: https://github.com/ntunlp/LLMSanitize

  46. Min-K%++: Improved Baseline for Detecting Pre-Training Data from Large Language Models (arXiv, 3 Apr 2024)
    Jingyang Zhang, Jingwei Sun, Eric Yeats, Yang Ouyang, Martin Kuo, Jianyi Zhang, Hao Yang, Hai Li [paper] [website] [code]

    Abstract The problem of pre-training data detection for large language models (LLMs) has received growing attention due to its implications in critical issues like copyright violation and test data contamination. The current state-of-the-art approach, Min-K%, measures the raw token probability which we argue may not be the most informative signal. Instead, we propose Min-K%++ to normalize the token probability with statistics of the categorical distribution over the whole vocabulary, which accurately reflects the relative likelihood of the target token compared with other candidate tokens in the vocabulary. Theoretically, we back up our method by showing that the statistic it estimates is explicitly optimized during LLM training, thus serving as a reliable indicator for detecting training data. Empirically, on the WikiMIA benchmark, Min-K%++ outperforms the SOTA Min-K% by 6.2% to 10.5% in detection AUROC averaged over five models. On the more challenging MIMIR benchmark, Min-K%++ consistently improves upon Min-K% and performs on par with reference-based method, despite not requiring an extra reference model.

  47. FreeEval: A Modular Framework for Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation of Large Language Models (arXiv, 9 Apr 2024)
    Zhuohao Yu, Chang Gao, Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Zhengran Zeng, Wei Ye, Jindong Wang, Yue Zhang, Shikun Zhang [paper] [code]

    Abstract The rapid development of large language model (LLM) evaluation methodologies and datasets has led to a profound challenge: integrating state-of-the-art evaluation techniques cost-effectively while ensuring reliability, reproducibility, and efficiency. Currently, there is a notable absence of a unified and adaptable framework that seamlessly integrates various evaluation approaches. Moreover, the reliability of evaluation findings is often questionable due to potential data contamination, with the evaluation efficiency commonly overlooked when facing the substantial costs associated with LLM inference. In response to these challenges, we introduce FreeEval, a modular and scalable framework crafted to enable trustworthy and efficient automatic evaluations of LLMs. Firstly, FreeEval's unified abstractions simplify the integration and improve the transparency of diverse evaluation methodologies, encompassing dynamic evaluation that demand sophisticated LLM interactions. Secondly, the framework integrates meta-evaluation techniques like human evaluation and data contamination detection, which, along with dynamic evaluation modules in the platform, enhance the fairness of the evaluation outcomes. Lastly, FreeEval is designed with a high-performance infrastructure, including distributed computation and caching strategies, enabling extensive evaluations across multi-node, multi-GPU clusters for open-source and proprietary LLMs.

  48. Benchmarking Benchmark Leakage in Large Language Models (arXiv, 29 Apr 2024)
    Ruijie Xu, Zengzhi Wang, Run-Ze Fan, Pengfei Liu [paper] [code] [website]

    Abstract Amid the expanding use of pre-training data, the phenomenon of benchmark dataset leakage has become increasingly prominent, exacerbated by opaque training processes and the often undisclosed inclusion of supervised data in contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). This issue skews benchmark effectiveness and fosters potentially unfair comparisons, impeding the field's healthy development. To address this, we introduce a detection pipeline utilizing Perplexity and N-gram accuracy, two simple and scalable metrics that gauge a model's prediction precision on benchmark, to identify potential data leakages. By analyzing 31 LLMs under the context of mathematical reasoning, we reveal substantial instances of training even test set misuse, resulting in potentially unfair comparisons. These findings prompt us to offer several recommendations regarding model documentation, benchmark setup, and future evaluations. Notably, we propose the "Benchmark Transparency Card" to encourage clear documentation of benchmark utilization, promoting transparency and healthy developments of LLMs. we have made our leaderboard, pipeline implementation, and model predictions publicly available, fostering future research.

  49. A Careful Examination of Large Language Model Performance on Grade School Arithmetic (arXiv, 1 May 2024)
    Hugh Zhang, Jeff Da, Dean Lee, Vaughn Robinson, Catherine Wu, Will Song, Tiffany Zhao, Pranav Raja, Dylan Slack, Qin Lyu, Sean Hendryx, Russell Kaplan, Michele Lunati, Summer Yue [paper]

    Abstract Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success on many benchmarks for mathematical reasoning. However, there is growing concern that some of this performance actually reflects dataset contamination, where data closely resembling benchmark questions leaks into the training data, instead of true reasoning ability. To investigate this claim rigorously, we commission Grade School Math 1000 (GSM1k). GSM1k is designed to mirror the style and complexity of the established GSM8k benchmark, the gold standard for measuring elementary mathematical reasoning. We ensure that the two benchmarks are comparable across important metrics such as human solve rates, number of steps in solution, answer magnitude, and more. When evaluating leading open- and closed-source LLMs on GSM1k, we observe accuracy drops of up to 13%, with several families of models (e.g., Phi and Mistral) showing evidence of systematic overfitting across almost all model sizes. At the same time, many models, especially those on the frontier, (e.g., Gemini/GPT/Claude) show minimal signs of overfitting. Further analysis suggests a positive relationship (Spearman's r^2=0.32) between a model's probability of generating an example from GSM8k and its performance gap between GSM8k and GSM1k, suggesting that many models may have partially memorized GSM8k.

  50. DICE: Detecting In-distribution Contamination in LLM's Fine-tuning Phase for Math Reasoning (arXiv, 6 June 2024)
    Shangqing Tu, Kejian Zhu, Yushi Bai, Zijun Yao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li [paper] [code]

    Abstract The advancement of large language models (LLMs) relies on evaluation using public benchmarks, but data contamination can lead to overestimated performance. Previous researches focus on detecting contamination by determining whether the model has seen the exact same data during training. In this work, we argue that even training on data similar to benchmark data inflates performance on in-distribution tasks without improving overall capacity, which we called In-distribution contamination. To effectively detect in-distribution contamination, we propose DICE, a novel method that leverages the internal states of LLMs to locate-then-detect the contamination. DICE first identifies the most sensitive layer to contamination, then trains a classifier based on the internal states of that layer. Experiments reveal DICE's high accuracy in detecting in-distribution contamination across various LLMs and math reasoning datasets. We also show the generalization capability of the trained DICE detector, which is able to detect contamination across multiple benchmarks with similar distributions. Additionally, we find that the DICE detection scores are positively correlated with the performance of ten LLMs fine-tuned by either us or other organizations on four math reasoning datasets (with R2 values between 0.6 and 0.75). This indicates that the in-distribution contamination problem potentially lead to an overestimation of the true capabilities of many existing models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/DICE.

  51. Benchmark Data Contamination of Large Language Models: A Survey (arXiv, 6 June 2024)
    Cheng Xu, Shuhao Guan, Derek Greene, M-Tahar Kechadi [paper]

    Abstract The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude-3, and Gemini has transformed the field of natural language processing. However, it has also resulted in a significant issue known as Benchmark Data Contamination (BDC). This occurs when language models inadvertently incorporate evaluation benchmark information from their training data, leading to inaccurate or unreliable performance during the evaluation phase of the process. This paper reviews the complex challenge of BDC in LLM evaluation and explores alternative assessment methods to mitigate the risks associated with traditional benchmarks. The paper also examines challenges and future directions in mitigating BDC risks, highlighting the complexity of the issue and the need for innovative solutions to ensure the reliability of LLM evaluation in real-world applications.

  52. LiveBench: A Challenging, Contamination-Free LLM Benchmark (GitHub, 14 June 2024)
    Colin White, Samuel Dooley, Manley Roberts, Arka Pal, Benjamin Feuer, Siddhartha Jain, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Neel Jain, Khalid Saifullah, Siddartha Naidu, Chinmay Hegde, Yann LeCun, Tom Goldstein, Willie Neiswanger, Micah Goldblum [paper] [code]

    Abstract Test set contamination, wherein test data from a benchmark ends up in a newer model’s training set, is a well-documented obstacle for fair LLM evaluation and can quickly render benchmarks obsolete. To mitigate this, many recent benchmarks crowdsource new prompts and evaluations from human or LLM judges; however, these can introduce significant biases, and break down when scoring hard questions. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark for LLMs designed to be immune to both test set contamination and the pitfalls of LLM judging and human crowdsourcing. We release LiveBench, the first benchmark that (1) contains frequently updated questions from recent information sources, (2) scores answers automatically according to objective ground-truth values, and (3) contains a wide variety of challenging tasks, spanning math, coding, reasoning, language, instruction following, and data analysis. To achieve this, LiveBench contains questions that are based on recently-released math competitions, arXiv papers, news articles, and datasets, and it contains harder, contamination-free versions of tasks from previous benchmarks such as Big-Bench Hard, AMPS, bAbI, and IFEval. We evaluate many prominent closed-source models, as well as dozens of open-source models ranging from 0.5B to 110B in size. LiveBench is difficult, with top models achieving below 60% accuracy. We release all questions, code, and model answers. Questions will be added and updated on a monthly basis, and we will release new tasks and harder versions of tasks over time so that LiveBench can distinguish between the capabilities of LLMs as they improve in the future. We welcome community engagement and collaboration for expanding the benchmark tasks and models.

  53. Evaluating Chinese Large Language Models on Discipline Knowledge Acquisition via Memorization and Robustness Assessment (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Chuang Liu, Renren Jin, Mark Steedman, Deyi Xiong [paper]

    Abstract Chinese LLMs demonstrate impressive performance on NLP tasks, particularly on discipline knowledge benchmarks, with some results approaching those of GPT-4. Previous research has viewed these advancements as potential outcomes of data contamination or leakage, prompting efforts to create new detection methods and address evaluation issues in LLM benchmarks. However, there has been a lack of comprehensive assessment of the evolution of Chinese LLMs. To address this gap, this paper offers a thorough investigation of Chinese LLMs on discipline knowledge evaluation, delving into the advancements of various LLMs, including a group of related models and others. Specifically, we have conducted six assessments ranging from knowledge memorization to comprehension for robustness, encompassing tasks like predicting incomplete questions and options, identifying behaviors by the contaminational fine-tuning, and answering rephrased questions. Experimental findings indicate a positive correlation between the release time of LLMs and their memorization capabilities, but they struggle with variations in original question-options pairs. Additionally, our findings suggest that question descriptions have a more significant impact on LLMs’ performance.

  54. Scaling Laws for Data Poisoning in LLMs (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Dillon Bowen, Brendan Murphy, Will Cai, David Khachaturov, Adam Gleave, Kellin Pelrine [paper]

    Abstract Recent work shows that LLMs are vulnerable to data poisoning, in which they are trained on partially corrupted or harmful data. Poisoned data is hard to detect, breaks guardrails, and leads to undesirable and harmful behavior. Given the intense efforts by leading labs to train and deploy increasingly larger and more capable LLMs, it is critical to ask if the risk of data poisoning will be naturally mitigated by scale, or if it is an increasing threat. We consider three threat models by which data poisoning can occur: malicious fine-tuning, imperfect data curation, and intentional data contamination. Our experiments evaluate the effects of data poisoning on 23 frontier LLMs ranging from 1.5-72 billion parameters on three datasets which speak to each of our threat models. We find that larger LLMs are increasingly vulnerable, learning harmful behavior significantly more quickly than smaller LLMs with even minimal data poisoning. These results underscore the need for robust safeguards against data poisoning in larger LLMs.

  55. LLM Dataset Inference: Did you train on my dataset? (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Pratyush Maini, Hengrui Jia, Nicolas Papernot, Adam Dziedzic [paper] [code]

    Abstract The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in the real world has come with a rise in copyright cases against companies for training their models on unlicensed data from the internet. Recent works have presented methods to identify if individual text sequences were members of the model's training data, known as membership inference attacks (MIAs). We demonstrate that the apparent success of these MIAs is confounded by selecting non-members (text sequences not used for training) belonging to a different distribution from the members (e.g., temporally shifted recent Wikipedia articles compared with ones used to train the model). This distribution shift makes membership inference appear successful. However, most MIA methods perform no better than random guessing when discriminating between members and non-members from the same distribution (e.g., in this case, the same period of time). Even when MIAs work, we find that different MIAs succeed at inferring membership of samples from different distributions. Instead, we propose a new dataset inference method to accurately identify the datasets used to train large language models. This paradigm sits realistically in the modern-day copyright landscape, where authors claim that an LLM is trained over multiple documents (such as a book) written by them, rather than one particular paragraph. While dataset inference shares many of the challenges of membership inference, we solve it by selectively combining the MIAs that provide positive signal for a given distribution, and aggregating them to perform a statistical test on a given dataset. Our approach successfully distinguishes the train and test sets of different subsets of the Pile with statistically significant p-values < 0.1, without any false positives.

  56. Rethinking LLM Memorization through the Lens of Adversarial Compression (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Avi Schwarzschild, Zhili Feng, Pratyush Maini, Zachary C. Lipton, J. Zico Kolter [paper] [website]

    Abstract Large language models (LLMs) trained on web-scale datasets raise substantial concerns regarding permissible data usage. One major question is whether these models "memorize" all their training data or they integrate many data sources in some way more akin to how a human would learn and synthesize information. The answer hinges, to a large degree, on how we define memorization. In this work, we propose the Adversarial Compression Ratio (ACR) as a metric for assessing memorization in LLMs. A given string from the training data is considered memorized if it can be elicited by a prompt (much) shorter than the string itself -- in other words, if these strings can be "compressed" with the model by computing adversarial prompts of fewer tokens. The ACR overcomes the limitations of existing notions of memorization by (i) offering an adversarial view of measuring memorization, especially for monitoring unlearning and compliance; and (ii) allowing for the flexibility to measure memorization for arbitrary strings at a reasonably low compute. Our definition serves as a practical tool for determining when model owners may be violating terms around data usage, providing a potential legal tool and a critical lens through which to address such scenarios.

  57. TOFU: A Task of Fictitious Unlearning for LLMs (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Pratyush Maini, Zhili Feng, Avi Schwarzschild, Zachary C. Lipton, J. Zico Kolter [paper] [website]

    Abstract Large language models trained on massive corpora of data from the web can memorize and reproduce sensitive or private data raising both legal and ethical concerns. Unlearning, or tuning models to forget information present in their training data, provides us with a way to protect private data after training. Although several methods exist for such unlearning, it is unclear to what extent they result in models equivalent to those where the data to be forgotten was never learned in the first place. To address this challenge, we present TOFU, a Task of Fictitious Unlearning, as a benchmark aimed at helping deepen our understanding of unlearning. We offer a dataset of 200 diverse synthetic author profiles, each consisting of 20 question-answer pairs, and a subset of these profiles called the forget set that serves as the target for unlearning. We compile a suite of metrics that work together to provide a holistic picture of unlearning efficacy. Finally, we provide a set of baseline results from existing unlearning algorithms. Importantly, none of the baselines we consider show effective unlearning motivating continued efforts to develop approaches for unlearning that effectively tune models so that they truly behave as if they were never trained on the forget data at all.

    Unlearning could be an important technique to mitigate contamination after it happens.

  58. Train-to-Test Contamination in Code Generation Evaluations (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Alexandre Matton, Tom Sherborne, Dennis Aumiller, Elena Tommasone, Milad Alizadeh, Jingyi He, Raymond Ma, Maxime Voisin, Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, Matthias Gallé [paper] [data]

    Abstract In this paper we consider contamination by code generation test sets, in particular in their use in modern large language models. We discuss three possible sources of such contamination and show findings supporting each of them: (i) direct data leakage, (ii) indirect data leakage through the use of synthetic data and (iii) overfitting to evaluation sets during model selection. Key to our findings is a new dataset of 161 prompts with their associated python solutions, dataset which is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereForAI/lbpp.

  59. Benchmark Inflation: Revealing LLM Performance Gaps Using Retro-Holdouts (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Jacob Haimes, Cenny Wenner, Kunvar Thaman, Vassil Tashev, Clement Neo, Esben Kran, Jason Hoelscher-Obermaier [paper]

    Abstract Public benchmarks are compromised, as the training data for many Large Language Models (LLMs) is contaminated with test data, suggesting a performance gap between benchmark scores and actual capabilities. Ideally, a private holdout set could be used to accurately verify scores. Unfortunately, such datasets do not exist for most benchmarks, and post-hoc construction of sufficiently similar datasets is non-trivial. To address these issues, we introduce a systematic methodology for (i) retrospectively constructing a holdout dataset for a target dataset, (ii) demonstrating the sufficient indistinguishability of this retro-holdout dataset, and (iii) comparing LLMs on the two datasets to quantify the performance gap due to the dataset’s public availability. Applying these methods to TruthfulQA, we construct and release Retro-TruthfulQA, on which we evaluate twenty LLMs and find that some have inflated scores by more than 10 percentage points. Our results demonstrate that public benchmark scores do not accurately assess model properties, and underscore the importance of improved data and evaluation practices in the field.

  60. Confounders in Instance Variation for the Analysis of Data Contamination (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Behzad Mehrbakhsh, Dario Garigliotti, Fernando Martínez-Plumed, Jose Hernandez-Orallo [paper]

    Abstract Test contamination is a serious problem for the evaluation of large language models (LLMs) because it leads to the overestimation of their performance and a quick saturation of benchmarks, even before the actual capability is achieved. One strategy to address this issue is the (adversarial) generation of variations, by including different exemplars and different rephrasings of the questions. However, these two interventions can lead to instances that can be more difficult (accumulating on the expected loss of performance by partly removing the contamination) but also to instances that can be less difficult (cancelling the expected loss of performance), which would make contamination undetectable. Understanding these two phenomena in terms of instance difficulty is critical to determine and measure contamination. In this paper we conduct a comprehensive analysis of these two interventions on an addition task with fine-tuned LLAMA-2 models.

  61. Unveiling the Spectrum of Data Contamination in Language Models: A Survey from Detection to Remediation (Findings of ACL 2024)
    Chunyuan Deng, Yilun Zhao, Yuzhao Heng, Yitong Li, Jiannan Cao, Xiangru Tang, Arman Cohan [paper]

    Abstract Data contamination has garnered increased attention in the era of Large language models (LLMs) due to the reliance on extensive internet-derived training corpora. The issue of training corpus overlap with evaluation benchmarks—referred to as contamination—has been the focus of significant recent research. This body of work aims to identify contamination, understand its impacts, and explore mitigation strategies from diverse perspectives. However, comprehensive studies that provide a clear pathway from foundational concepts to advanced insights are lacking in this nascent field. Therefore, we present the first survey in the field of data contamination. We begin by examining the effects of data contamination across various stages and forms. We then provide a detailed analysis of current contamination detection methods, categorizing them to highlight their focus, assumptions, strengths, and limitations. We also discuss mitigation strategies, offering a clear guide for future research. This survey serves as a succinct overview of the most recent advancements in data contamination research, providing a straightforward guide for the benefit of future research endeavors.

  62. A Taxonomy for Data Contamination in Large Language Models (ACL 2024 The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination)
    Medha Palavalli, Amanda Bertsch, Matthew Gormley [paper]

    Abstract Large language models pretrained on extensive web corpora demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, a growing concern is data contamination, where evaluation datasets may unintentionally be contained in the pretraining corpus, inflating model performance. Decontamination, the process of detecting and removing such data, is a potential solution; yet these contaminants may originate from altered versions of the test set, evading detection during decontamination. How different types of contamination impact the performance of language models on downstream tasks is not fully understood. We present a taxonomy that categorizes the various types of contamination encountered by LLMs during the pretraining phase and identify which types pose the highest risk. We analyze the impact of contamination on two key NLP tasks—summarization and question answering—revealing how different types of contamination influence task performance during evaluation.

  63. Proving membership in LLM pretraining data via data watermarks (Findings of ACL 2024)
    Johnny Wei, Ryan Yixiang Wang, Robin Jia [paper]

    Abstract Detecting whether copyright holders’ works were used in LLM pretraining is poised to be an important problem. This work proposes using data watermarks to enable principled detection with only black-box model access, provided that the rightholder contributed multiple training documents and watermarked them before public release. By applying a randomly sampled data watermark, detection can be framed as hypothesis testing, which provides guarantees on the false detection rate. We study two watermarks: one that inserts random sequences, and another that randomly substitutes characters with Unicode lookalikes. We first show how three aspects of watermark design - watermark length, number of duplications, and interference - affect the power of the hypothesis test. Next, we study how a watermark’s detection strength changes under model and dataset scaling: while increasing the dataset size decreases the strength of the watermark, watermarks remain strong if the model size also increases. Finally, we view SHA hashes as natural watermarks and show that we can robustly detect hashes from BLOOM-176B’s training data, as long as they occurred at least 90 times. Together, our results point towards a promising future for data watermarks in real world use.

  64. Data Contamination Calibration for Black-box LLMs (Findings of ACL 2024)
    Wentao Ye, Jiaqi Hu, Liyao Li, Haobo Wang, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao [paper]

    Abstract The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) tightly associate with the expansion of the training data size. However, the unchecked ultra-large-scale training sets introduce a series of potential risks like data contamination, i.e. the benchmark data is used for training. In this work, we propose a holistic method named Polarized Augment Calibration (PAC) along with a new to-be-released dataset to detect the contaminated data and diminish the contamination effect. PAC extends the popular MIA (Membership Inference Attack) — from machine learning community — by forming a more global target at detecting training data to Clarify invisible training data. As a pioneering work, PAC is very much plug-and-play that can be integrated with most (if not all) current white- and black-box LLMs. By extensive experiments, PAC outperforms existing methods by at least 4.5%, towards data contamination detection on more 4 dataset formats, with more than 10 base LLMs. Besides, our application in real-world scenarios highlights the prominent presence of contamination and related issues.

  65. DARG: Dynamic Evaluation of Large Language Models via Adaptive Reasoning Graph (arXiv, 25 June 2024)
    Zhehao Zhang, Jiaao Chen, Diyi Yang [paper] [code]

    Abstract The current paradigm of evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) through static benchmarks comes with significant limitations, such as vulnerability to data contamination and a lack of adaptability to the evolving capabilities of LLMs. Therefore, evaluation methods that can adapt and generate evaluation data with controlled complexity are urgently needed. In this work, we introduce Dynamic Evaluation of LLMs via Adaptive Reasoning Graph Evolvement (DARG) to dynamically extend current benchmarks with controlled complexity and diversity. Specifically, we first extract the reasoning graphs of data points in current benchmarks and then perturb the reasoning graphs to generate novel testing data. Such newly generated test samples can have different levels of complexity while maintaining linguistic diversity similar to the original benchmarks. We further use a code-augmented LLM to ensure the label correctness of newly generated data. We apply our DARG framework to diverse reasoning tasks in four domains with 15 state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that almost all LLMs experience a performance decrease with increased complexity and certain LLMs exhibit significant drops. Additionally, we find that LLMs exhibit more biases when being evaluated via the data generated by DARG with higher complexity levels. These observations provide useful insights into how to dynamically and adaptively evaluate LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/DARG.

  66. VarBench: Robust Language Model Benchmarking Through Dynamic Variable Perturbation (arXiv, 25 June 2024)
    Kun Qian, Shunji Wan, Claudia Tang, Youzhi Wang, Xuanming Zhang, Maximillian Chen, Zhou Yu [paper] [code]

    Abstract As large language models achieve impressive scores on traditional benchmarks, an increasing number of researchers are becoming concerned about benchmark data leakage during pre-training, commonly known as the data contamination problem. To ensure fair evaluation, recent benchmarks release only the training and validation sets, keeping the test set labels closed-source. They require anyone wishing to evaluate his language model to submit the model's predictions for centralized processing and then publish the model's result on their leaderboard. However, this submission process is inefficient and prevents effective error analysis. To address this issue, we propose to variabilize benchmarks and evaluate language models dynamically. Specifically, we extract variables from each test case and define a value range for each variable. For each evaluation, we sample new values from these value ranges to create unique test cases, thus ensuring a fresh evaluation each time. We applied this variable perturbation method to four datasets: GSM8K, ARC, CommonsenseQA, and TruthfulQA, which cover mathematical generation and multiple-choice tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach provides a more accurate assessment of the true capabilities of language models, effectively mitigating the contamination problem.

  67. Decentralized Arena via Collective LLM Intelligence (Blog, Oct 2024)
    Yanbin Yin, Zhen Wang, Kun Zhou, Xiangdong Zhang, Shibo Hao, Yi Gu, Jieyuan Liu, Somanshu Singla, Tianyang Liu, Xing Eric P., Zhengzhong Liu, Haojian Jin, Zhiting Hu [blog] [leaderboard]

    Abstract We release Decentralized Arena that automates and scales “Chatbot Arena” for LLM evaluation across various fine-grained dimensions (e.g., math – algebra, geometry, probability; logical reasoning, social reasoning, biology, chemistry, …). The evaluation is decentralized and democratic, with all LLMs participating in evaluating others. It achieves a 95% correlation with Chatbot Arena's overall rankings, while being fully transparent and reproducible.

🧰 Resources

📊 Datasets

Many contamination detection work and contamination indices are done on open-sourced pretraining corpora against interested existing benchmarks or datasets. Below is a non-exhaustive list of these popular choices:

Corpora Benchmarks

There are also some recent efforts to create datasets tailored to contamination detection, such as:

🛠️ Tools

In general, there are two types of data contamination tools: contamination detector, which identifies the contamination risk for a given test set w/ or w/o knowing the pretraining corpus, and contamination index, which documents the contamination risk of public benchmarks against foundation models or pretraining corpora and is utilized for a trustworthy comparison of foundation models.

Contamination index could be a product of contamination detectors. However, proprietary models do not disclose details about their pretraining corpora, invalidating most contamination detectors. Hence, relevant contamination statistics of these models can only be collected in the released paper or technical reports and are not reproducible in general.

A reference list of contamination detectors and contamination indices is as follows:

Contamination Detector Contamination Index

Note

We explicitly mark the entrance with [*] if the mentioned tools possess multiple functions.

Some open-sourced evaluation tools provide the decontamination option, which leverages contamination detectors to eliminate compromised test instances during evaluation and delivers more trustworthy evaluation results. Exemplary evaluation tools of this kind are:

🚩 Citation

Please cite our repo if find our work useful.

@misc{li2024awesome,
  author = {Yanyang Li},
  title = {Awesome Data Contamination},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/lyy1994/awesome-data-contamination}},
}

🎉 Contribution

We thank all contributors to this repo ❤️

There are cases where we miss important work in this field. We welcome opening PRs/issues to contribute to this repo and make this paper list more complete 😊

🤝 Acknowledgement

We referred to the template of Knowledge Editing for LLMs Papers when building this paper list. Thanks to its authors for their impressive work!

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