In plain words: A simple check measures how easily a model predicts the exact wording of benchmark answers; high precision hints those questions were in its training data. Testing 31 language models on math problems, it found many trained even on test sets, making scores hard to compare fairly.
Abstract
Amid the expanding use of pre-training data, the phenomenon of benchmark dataset leakage has become increasingly prominent, exacerbated by opaque training processes and the often undisclosed inclusion of supervised data in contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). This issue skews benchmark effectiveness and fosters potentially unfair comparisons, impeding the field's healthy development. To address this, we introduce a detection pipeline utilizing Perplexity and N-gram accuracy, two simple and scalable metrics that gauge a model's prediction precision on benchmark, to identify potential data leakages. By analyzing 31 LLMs under the context of mathematical reasoning, we reveal substantial instances of training even test set misuse, resulting in potentially unfair comparisons. These findings prompt us to offer several recommendations regarding model documentation, benchmark setup, and future evaluations. Notably, we propose the "Benchmark Transparency Card" to encourage clear documentation of benchmark utilization, promoting transparency and healthy developments of LLMs. we have made our leaderboard, pipeline implementation, and model predictions publicly available, fostering future research.
Ruijie Xu, Zengzhi Wang, Run-Ze Fan, Pengfei Liu
arXiv:2404.18824 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Apr 29, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 30 pages; Homepage: https://gair-nlp.github.io/benbench