Approximating Language Model Training Data from Weights

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Morris, John X., Yin, Junjie Oscar, Kim, Woojeong, Shmatikov, Vitaly, Rush, Alexander M.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Morris, John X.
Yin, Junjie Oscar
Kim, Woojeong
Shmatikov, Vitaly
Rush, Alexander M.
author_facet Morris, John X.
Yin, Junjie Oscar
Kim, Woojeong
Shmatikov, Vitaly
Rush, Alexander M.
contents Modern language models often have open weights but closed training data. We formalize the problem of data approximation from model weights and propose several baselines and metrics. We develop a gradient-based approach that selects the highest-matching data from a large public text corpus and show its effectiveness at recovering useful data given only weights of the original and finetuned models. Even when none of the true training data is known, our method is able to locate a small subset of public Web documents can be used to train a model to close to the original model performance given models trained for both classification and supervised-finetuning. On the AG News classification task, our method improves performance from 65% (using randomly selected data) to 80%, approaching the expert benchmark of 88%. When applied to a model trained with SFT on MSMARCO web documents, our method reduces perplexity from 3.3 to 2.3, compared to an expert LLAMA model's perplexity of 2.0.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_15553
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Approximating Language Model Training Data from Weights
Morris, John X.
Yin, Junjie Oscar
Kim, Woojeong
Shmatikov, Vitaly
Rush, Alexander M.
Computation and Language
Modern language models often have open weights but closed training data. We formalize the problem of data approximation from model weights and propose several baselines and metrics. We develop a gradient-based approach that selects the highest-matching data from a large public text corpus and show its effectiveness at recovering useful data given only weights of the original and finetuned models. Even when none of the true training data is known, our method is able to locate a small subset of public Web documents can be used to train a model to close to the original model performance given models trained for both classification and supervised-finetuning. On the AG News classification task, our method improves performance from 65% (using randomly selected data) to 80%, approaching the expert benchmark of 88%. When applied to a model trained with SFT on MSMARCO web documents, our method reduces perplexity from 3.3 to 2.3, compared to an expert LLAMA model's perplexity of 2.0.
title Approximating Language Model Training Data from Weights
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15553