Detecting Distillation Data from Reasoning Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Hengxiang, Choi, Hyeong Kyu, Li, Sharon, Wei, Hongxin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhang, Hengxiang
Choi, Hyeong Kyu
Li, Sharon
Wei, Hongxin
author_facet Zhang, Hengxiang
Choi, Hyeong Kyu
Li, Sharon
Wei, Hongxin
contents Reasoning distillation has emerged as a prevailing paradigm for transferring reasoning capabilities from large reasoning models to small language models. Yet, reasoning distillation risks data contamination: benchmark data may inadvertently be included in the distillation data, thereby inflating model performance metrics. In this work, we formally define the distillation data detection task, which determines whether a given question is included in the model's distillation data. The unique challenge of this task lies in the partial availability of distillation data. To address this, we propose Token Probability Deviation (TPD), a detection method that leverages the probability patterns of output tokens generated by the model instead of input tokens. Our method is motivated by the observation that seen questions tend to elicit more near-deterministic tokens generated by the models than unseen ones. Our TPD score is thus designed to quantify the token-level deviation of generated tokens from a high-confidence reference probability. Consequently, seen questions can yield substantially lower TPD scores than unseen ones, enabling strong detection performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, improving detection AUC by up to 31% on distillation datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04850
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Detecting Distillation Data from Reasoning Models
Zhang, Hengxiang
Choi, Hyeong Kyu
Li, Sharon
Wei, Hongxin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Reasoning distillation has emerged as a prevailing paradigm for transferring reasoning capabilities from large reasoning models to small language models. Yet, reasoning distillation risks data contamination: benchmark data may inadvertently be included in the distillation data, thereby inflating model performance metrics. In this work, we formally define the distillation data detection task, which determines whether a given question is included in the model's distillation data. The unique challenge of this task lies in the partial availability of distillation data. To address this, we propose Token Probability Deviation (TPD), a detection method that leverages the probability patterns of output tokens generated by the model instead of input tokens. Our method is motivated by the observation that seen questions tend to elicit more near-deterministic tokens generated by the models than unseen ones. Our TPD score is thus designed to quantify the token-level deviation of generated tokens from a high-confidence reference probability. Consequently, seen questions can yield substantially lower TPD scores than unseen ones, enabling strong detection performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, improving detection AUC by up to 31% on distillation datasets.
title Detecting Distillation Data from Reasoning Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04850