Measuring Fingerprints of Web-filtered Text Datasets and Fingerprint Propagation Through Training

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mansour, Youssef, Heckel, Reinhard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909932511559680
author Mansour, Youssef
Heckel, Reinhard
author_facet Mansour, Youssef
Heckel, Reinhard
contents We investigate fingerprints in pretraining datasets for large language models (LLMs) through dataset classification experiments. Building on prior work demonstrating the existence of fingerprints or biases in popular computer vision datasets, we analyze popular open-source pretraining datasets for LLMs derived from CommonCrawl including C4, RefinedWeb, DolmaCC, RedPajama-V2, FineWeb, and DCLM-Baseline. Despite those datasets being obtained with similar curation steps, neural networks can classify surprisingly well which dataset a single text sequence belongs to, significantly better than a human can. This indicates that small differences in filtering and processing pipelines induce fingerprints. Those fingerprints are evident in formatting, vocabulary, and content distributions, and can negatively impact cross-dataset generalization. Additionally, we show that these fingerprints propagate through training: sequences generated by models trained on those datasets can be accurately classified by a classifier trained on the original datasets. This can offer insights into data characteristics that are typically undisclosed by LLM developers, including pretraining mixture proportions and finetuning data sources.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02857
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Measuring Fingerprints of Web-filtered Text Datasets and Fingerprint Propagation Through Training
Mansour, Youssef
Heckel, Reinhard
Machine Learning
We investigate fingerprints in pretraining datasets for large language models (LLMs) through dataset classification experiments. Building on prior work demonstrating the existence of fingerprints or biases in popular computer vision datasets, we analyze popular open-source pretraining datasets for LLMs derived from CommonCrawl including C4, RefinedWeb, DolmaCC, RedPajama-V2, FineWeb, and DCLM-Baseline. Despite those datasets being obtained with similar curation steps, neural networks can classify surprisingly well which dataset a single text sequence belongs to, significantly better than a human can. This indicates that small differences in filtering and processing pipelines induce fingerprints. Those fingerprints are evident in formatting, vocabulary, and content distributions, and can negatively impact cross-dataset generalization. Additionally, we show that these fingerprints propagate through training: sequences generated by models trained on those datasets can be accurately classified by a classifier trained on the original datasets. This can offer insights into data characteristics that are typically undisclosed by LLM developers, including pretraining mixture proportions and finetuning data sources.
title Measuring Fingerprints of Web-filtered Text Datasets and Fingerprint Propagation Through Training
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02857