In plain words: They sort memorized text into three kinds: reciting heavily repeated passages, rebuilding naturally predictable ones, and recalling the rest. A predictor of what gets memorized shows different traits drive each kind, unlike the usual one-size-fits-all view.
Abstract
Memorization in language models is typically treated as a homogenous phenomenon, neglecting the specifics of the memorized data. We instead model memorization as the effect of a set of complex factors that describe each sample and relate it to the model and corpus. To build intuition around these factors, we break memorization down into a taxonomy: recitation of highly duplicated sequences, reconstruction of inherently predictable sequences, and recollection of sequences that are neither. We demonstrate the usefulness of our taxonomy by using it to construct a predictive model for memorization. By analyzing dependencies and inspecting the weights of the predictive model, we find that different factors influence the likelihood of memorization differently depending on the taxonomic category.
USVSN Sai Prashanth, Alvin Deng, Kyle O'Brien, Jyothir S, Mohammad Aflah Khan, Jaydeep Borkar, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Jacob Ray Fuehne, Stella Biderman, Tracy Ke, Katherine Lee, Naomi Saphra
arXiv:2406.17746 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Jun 25, 2024 · updated May 7, 2025
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