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Canary Contamination in GPT-4

  • Canary Contamination in GPT-4

    The BIG-Bench canary string is an EICAR- or GTUBE-style canary string which should never appear in LLM training datasets, or by extension, in trained models or their output. Its intention is that any test documents containing that string can be excluded from training, so that benchmark tests will be accurate. Unfortunately, it looks like they weren’t excluded — Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-base will reproduce the string; and:

    Of 19 tested [benchmarking] tasks, GPT-4-base perfectly recalled large (non-trivial) portions of code for: The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus; Simple arithmetic; Diverse Metrics for Social Biases in Language Models; Convince Me
    Great work. In case you were wondering why the LLMs all seem to do so well on their benchmarks, now you know — they were training on the test data.

    (tags: ai llm testing benchmarking big-bench gpt-4 claude)