Cited by 39Adversarial Robustness in Machine LearningTopic ModelingMachine Learning and Data Classification

Stop Uploading Test Data in Plain Text: Practical Strategies for Mitigating Data Contamination by Evaluation Benchmarks

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Jacovi, Alon, Caciularu, Avi, Goldman, Omer, Goldberg, Yoav·2023·Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Data contamination has become prevalent and challenging with the rise of models pretrained on large automatically-crawled corpora.For closed models, the training data becomes a trade secret, and even for open models, it is not trivial to detect contamination.Strategies such as leaderboards with hidden answers, or using test data which is guaranteed to be unseen, are expensive and become fragile with time.Assuming that all relevant actors value clean test data and will cooperate to mitigate data contamination, what can be done?We propose three strategies that can make a difference: (1) Test data made public should be encrypted with a public key and licensed to disallow derivative distribution; (2) demand training exclusion controls from closed API holders, and protect your test data by refusing to evaluate without them; (3) avoid data which appears with its solution on the internet, and release the web-page context of internet-derived data along with the data.These strategies are practical and can be effective in preventing data contamination.

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  • Encrypting the test set prior to uploading can enhance security.

    “As suggested by Jacovi et al. (2023), encrypting the test set prior to uploading can enhance security.”

    From Benchmarking Benchmark Leakage in Large Language Models (2024) · cites this paper as Jacovi et al. (2023)

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Authors
Jacovi, A., Caciularu, A., Goldman, O., & Goldberg, Y.
Affiliations
  • Bar-Ilan University (IL)
  • Google (United States) (US)
Corresponding author
Jacovi, Alon
Venue
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Published
2023
Pages
5075-5084
OpenAlex
W4389518805
Cited by
36
References
43
Citations by year
2026: 11 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 7
FWCI
6.38
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nd)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • European Commission (HORIZON2020)
  • H2020 European Research Council (802774)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning and Data Classification
Keywords
contaminated data, evaluation benchmark, training data leakage, public-key encryption, data provenance, LLM evaluation

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