PaCoST: Paired Confidence Significance Testing for Benchmark Contamination Detection in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Huixuan, Lin, Yun, Wan, Xiaojun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhang, Huixuan
Lin, Yun
Wan, Xiaojun
author_facet Zhang, Huixuan
Lin, Yun
Wan, Xiaojun
contents Large language models (LLMs) are known to be trained on vast amounts of data, which may unintentionally or intentionally include data from commonly used benchmarks. This inclusion can lead to cheatingly high scores on model leaderboards, yet result in disappointing performance in real-world applications. To address this benchmark contamination problem, we first propose a set of requirements that practical contamination detection methods should follow. Following these proposed requirements, we introduce PaCoST, a Paired Confidence Significance Testing to effectively detect benchmark contamination in LLMs. Our method constructs a counterpart for each piece of data with the same distribution, and performs statistical analysis of the corresponding confidence to test whether the model is significantly more confident under the original benchmark. We validate the effectiveness of PaCoST and apply it on popular open-source models and benchmarks. We find that almost all models and benchmarks we tested are suspected contaminated more or less. We finally call for new LLM evaluation methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_18326
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PaCoST: Paired Confidence Significance Testing for Benchmark Contamination Detection in Large Language Models
Zhang, Huixuan
Lin, Yun
Wan, Xiaojun
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) are known to be trained on vast amounts of data, which may unintentionally or intentionally include data from commonly used benchmarks. This inclusion can lead to cheatingly high scores on model leaderboards, yet result in disappointing performance in real-world applications. To address this benchmark contamination problem, we first propose a set of requirements that practical contamination detection methods should follow. Following these proposed requirements, we introduce PaCoST, a Paired Confidence Significance Testing to effectively detect benchmark contamination in LLMs. Our method constructs a counterpart for each piece of data with the same distribution, and performs statistical analysis of the corresponding confidence to test whether the model is significantly more confident under the original benchmark. We validate the effectiveness of PaCoST and apply it on popular open-source models and benchmarks. We find that almost all models and benchmarks we tested are suspected contaminated more or less. We finally call for new LLM evaluation methods.
title PaCoST: Paired Confidence Significance Testing for Benchmark Contamination Detection in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18326