Measuring Non-Adversarial Reproduction of Training Data in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Aerni, Michael, Rando, Javier, Debenedetti, Edoardo, Carlini, Nicholas, Ippolito, Daphne, Tramèr, Florian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Aerni, Michael
Rando, Javier
Debenedetti, Edoardo
Carlini, Nicholas
Ippolito, Daphne
Tramèr, Florian
author_facet Aerni, Michael
Rando, Javier
Debenedetti, Edoardo
Carlini, Nicholas
Ippolito, Daphne
Tramèr, Florian
contents Large language models memorize parts of their training data. Memorizing short snippets and facts is required to answer questions about the world and to be fluent in any language. But models have also been shown to reproduce long verbatim sequences of memorized text when prompted by a motivated adversary. In this work, we investigate an intermediate regime of memorization that we call non-adversarial reproduction, where we quantify the overlap between model responses and pretraining data when responding to natural and benign prompts. For a variety of innocuous prompt categories (e.g., writing a letter or a tutorial), we show that up to 15% of the text output by popular conversational language models overlaps with snippets from the Internet. In worst cases, we find generations where 100% of the content can be found exactly online. For the same tasks, we find that human-written text has far less overlap with Internet data. We further study whether prompting strategies can close this reproduction gap between models and humans. While appropriate prompting can reduce non-adversarial reproduction on average, we find that mitigating worst-case reproduction of training data requires stronger defenses -- even for benign interactions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_10242
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Measuring Non-Adversarial Reproduction of Training Data in Large Language Models
Aerni, Michael
Rando, Javier
Debenedetti, Edoardo
Carlini, Nicholas
Ippolito, Daphne
Tramèr, Florian
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large language models memorize parts of their training data. Memorizing short snippets and facts is required to answer questions about the world and to be fluent in any language. But models have also been shown to reproduce long verbatim sequences of memorized text when prompted by a motivated adversary. In this work, we investigate an intermediate regime of memorization that we call non-adversarial reproduction, where we quantify the overlap between model responses and pretraining data when responding to natural and benign prompts. For a variety of innocuous prompt categories (e.g., writing a letter or a tutorial), we show that up to 15% of the text output by popular conversational language models overlaps with snippets from the Internet. In worst cases, we find generations where 100% of the content can be found exactly online. For the same tasks, we find that human-written text has far less overlap with Internet data. We further study whether prompting strategies can close this reproduction gap between models and humans. While appropriate prompting can reduce non-adversarial reproduction on average, we find that mitigating worst-case reproduction of training data requires stronger defenses -- even for benign interactions.
title Measuring Non-Adversarial Reproduction of Training Data in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10242