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Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models (arxiv.org)
2 points by callmekit on Dec 16, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Carefully chosen prompts can make a trained language model spit out exact passages from the private text it learned on. The attack recovered hundreds of word-for-word passages, including names and phone numbers, from one large model, and bigger models leaked more than smaller ones.

Abstract

It has become common to publish large (billion parameter) language models that have been trained on private datasets. This paper demonstrates that in such settings, an adversary can perform a training data extraction attack to recover individual training examples by querying the language model. We demonstrate our attack on GPT-2, a language model trained on scrapes of the public Internet, and are able to extract hundreds of verbatim text sequences from the model's training data. These extracted examples include (public) personally identifiable information (names, phone numbers, and email addresses), IRC conversations, code, and 128-bit UUIDs. Our attack is possible even though each of the above sequences are included in just one document in the training data. We comprehensively evaluate our extraction attack to understand the factors that contribute to its success. Worryingly, we find that larger models are more vulnerable than smaller models. We conclude by drawing lessons and discussing possible safeguards for training large language models.

Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramer, Eric Wallace, Matthew Jagielski, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Katherine Lee, Adam Roberts, Tom Brown, Dawn Song, Ulfar Erlingsson, Alina Oprea, Colin Raffel
arXiv:2012.07805 · cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Dec 14, 2020 · updated Jun 15, 2021
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