How Contaminated Is Your Benchmark? Quantifying Dataset Leakage in Large Language Models with Kernel Divergence

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Choi, Hyeong Kyu, Khanov, Maxim, Wei, Hongxin, Li, Yixuan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866910958330314752
author Choi, Hyeong Kyu
Khanov, Maxim
Wei, Hongxin
Li, Yixuan
author_facet Choi, Hyeong Kyu
Khanov, Maxim
Wei, Hongxin
Li, Yixuan
contents Dataset contamination, where evaluation datasets overlap with pre-training corpora, inflates performance metrics and undermines the reliability of model evaluations. Measuring dataset contamination thus becomes essential to ensure that performance evaluations genuinely reflect a model's ability to generalize to unseen data, rather than relying on memorized examples. To address this problem, we propose Kernel Divergence Score (KDS), a novel method that evaluates dataset contamination by computing the divergence between the kernel similarity matrix of sample embeddings, before and after fine-tuning on the benchmark dataset. Leveraging the insight that fine-tuning affects unseen samples more significantly than seen ones, KDS provides a reliable measure of contamination. Through extensive experiments on controlled contamination scenarios, KDS demonstrates a near-perfect correlation with contamination levels and outperforms existing baselines. Additionally, we perform comprehensive ablation studies to analyze the impact of key design choices, providing deeper insights into the components and effectiveness of KDS. These ablations highlight the importance of leveraging fine-grained kernel-based information and confirm the reliability of the proposed framework across diverse datasets and settings. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/kernel-divergence-score.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_00678
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Contaminated Is Your Benchmark? Quantifying Dataset Leakage in Large Language Models with Kernel Divergence
Choi, Hyeong Kyu
Khanov, Maxim
Wei, Hongxin
Li, Yixuan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Dataset contamination, where evaluation datasets overlap with pre-training corpora, inflates performance metrics and undermines the reliability of model evaluations. Measuring dataset contamination thus becomes essential to ensure that performance evaluations genuinely reflect a model's ability to generalize to unseen data, rather than relying on memorized examples. To address this problem, we propose Kernel Divergence Score (KDS), a novel method that evaluates dataset contamination by computing the divergence between the kernel similarity matrix of sample embeddings, before and after fine-tuning on the benchmark dataset. Leveraging the insight that fine-tuning affects unseen samples more significantly than seen ones, KDS provides a reliable measure of contamination. Through extensive experiments on controlled contamination scenarios, KDS demonstrates a near-perfect correlation with contamination levels and outperforms existing baselines. Additionally, we perform comprehensive ablation studies to analyze the impact of key design choices, providing deeper insights into the components and effectiveness of KDS. These ablations highlight the importance of leveraging fine-grained kernel-based information and confirm the reliability of the proposed framework across diverse datasets and settings. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/kernel-divergence-score.
title How Contaminated Is Your Benchmark? Quantifying Dataset Leakage in Large Language Models with Kernel Divergence
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00678