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

Alon Jacovi, Avi Caciularu, Omer Goldman, Yoav Goldberg


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.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.308
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5075–5084
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.308
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.308
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alon Jacovi, Avi Caciularu, Omer Goldman, and Yoav Goldberg. 2023. Stop Uploading Test Data in Plain Text: Practical Strategies for Mitigating Data Contamination by Evaluation Benchmarks. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5075–5084, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stop Uploading Test Data in Plain Text: Practical Strategies for Mitigating Data Contamination by Evaluation Benchmarks (Jacovi et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.308.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.308.mp4