@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-controllable,
title = "Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable {LLM} Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees",
author = "Zhang, Zheng and
Liu, Qi and
Liang, Siyuan and
Li, Ning and
Hu, Zirui and
Gao, Weibo and
Li, Rui and
Huang, Zhenya and
Rutkowski, Leszek and
Yu, Baosheng and
Tao, Dacheng",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1390/",
pages = "30122--30143",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by large-scale pretraining. However, this data abundance introduces test data contamination, where benchmark datasets overlap with pretraining corpora, undermining the reliability of model evaluation by confounding memorization with genuine generalization. To mitigate this issue, existing training data detectors attempt to identify clean (unseen) samples from contaminated test sets, but often suffer from residual contamination due to the black-box nature of LLMs. As a result, contaminated data may be mistakenly retained, leading to unreliable evaluation.To address this challenge, we propose FTD (FDR-controlled Training Data detection), a principled framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data while providing a statistical guarantee: the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained as clean, the false discovery rate (FDR), is provably controlled below a user-specified threshold. FTD combines multiple complementary detectors via an adaptive weighting strategy, and we theoretically show it achieves high statistical power under valid FDR control. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that FTD significantly reduces residual contamination compared to existing methods while preserving evaluation consistency."
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<abstract>Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by large-scale pretraining. However, this data abundance introduces test data contamination, where benchmark datasets overlap with pretraining corpora, undermining the reliability of model evaluation by confounding memorization with genuine generalization. To mitigate this issue, existing training data detectors attempt to identify clean (unseen) samples from contaminated test sets, but often suffer from residual contamination due to the black-box nature of LLMs. As a result, contaminated data may be mistakenly retained, leading to unreliable evaluation.To address this challenge, we propose FTD (FDR-controlled Training Data detection), a principled framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data while providing a statistical guarantee: the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained as clean, the false discovery rate (FDR), is provably controlled below a user-specified threshold. FTD combines multiple complementary detectors via an adaptive weighting strategy, and we theoretically show it achieves high statistical power under valid FDR control. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that FTD significantly reduces residual contamination compared to existing methods while preserving evaluation consistency.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable LLM Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees
%A Zhang, Zheng
%A Liu, Qi
%A Liang, Siyuan
%A Li, Ning
%A Hu, Zirui
%A Gao, Weibo
%A Li, Rui
%A Huang, Zhenya
%A Rutkowski, Leszek
%A Yu, Baosheng
%A Tao, Dacheng
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F zhang-etal-2026-controllable
%X Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by large-scale pretraining. However, this data abundance introduces test data contamination, where benchmark datasets overlap with pretraining corpora, undermining the reliability of model evaluation by confounding memorization with genuine generalization. To mitigate this issue, existing training data detectors attempt to identify clean (unseen) samples from contaminated test sets, but often suffer from residual contamination due to the black-box nature of LLMs. As a result, contaminated data may be mistakenly retained, leading to unreliable evaluation.To address this challenge, we propose FTD (FDR-controlled Training Data detection), a principled framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data while providing a statistical guarantee: the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained as clean, the false discovery rate (FDR), is provably controlled below a user-specified threshold. FTD combines multiple complementary detectors via an adaptive weighting strategy, and we theoretically show it achieves high statistical power under valid FDR control. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that FTD significantly reduces residual contamination compared to existing methods while preserving evaluation consistency.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1390/
%P 30122-30143
Markdown (Informal)
[Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable LLM Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1390/) (Zhang et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Zheng Zhang, Qi Liu, Siyuan Liang, Ning Li, Zirui Hu, Weibo Gao, Rui Li, Zhenya Huang, Leszek Rutkowski, Baosheng Yu, and Dacheng Tao. 2026. Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable LLM Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 30122–30143, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.