Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Deng, Chunyuan, Zhao, Yilun, Tang, Xiangru, Gerstein, Mark, Cohan, Arman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Deng, Chunyuan
Zhao, Yilun
Tang, Xiangru
Gerstein, Mark
Cohan, Arman
author_facet Deng, Chunyuan
Zhao, Yilun
Tang, Xiangru
Gerstein, Mark
Cohan, Arman
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_09783
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models
Deng, Chunyuan
Zhao, Yilun
Tang, Xiangru
Gerstein, Mark
Cohan, Arman
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
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.
title Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09783