arXiv:2601.04301cs.LGcs.CL2026-01被引 4

测试集污染会显著高估生成模型性能,且影响随模型规模扩大而加剧。

Quantifying the Effect of Test Set Contamination on Generative Evaluations

  • 在预训练中加入测试集副本,模型性能随规模增长而提升
  • 单个测试集副本即可让模型损失低于不可约误差
  • 高温采样和长输出可缓解记忆效应,适合评估可信性

随着前沿AI系统基于网络规模数据预训练,测试集污染已成为准确评估其能力的关键挑战。尽管已有研究深入探讨了污染对判别式评估(如多选题问答)的影响,但对生成式评估的影响研究较少。本文通过语言模型生命周期,定量分析污染对生成评估的影响:在混合网络数据与MATH基准的预训练中,模型规模和测试集副本数量增加均导致性能提升。利用缩放定律发现,即使仅包含一个测试集副本,模型也能实现低于在无污染语料上训练的不可约误差的损失。进一步训练显示,用新数据过训练可减轻污染影响;而基于训练集的监督微调则可能提升或降低测试表现,取决于预训练污染程度。推理阶段,高采样温度可缓解污染效应,且长解码序列比短序列更难被记忆,这与判别式评估中仅数个词的解码形成对比。本研究揭示了生成与记忆交互的新复杂性,为可信的AI评估提供重要洞见。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

As frontier AI systems are pretrained on web-scale data, test set contamination has become a critical concern for accurately assessing their capabilities. While research has thoroughly investigated the impact of test set contamination on discriminative evaluations like multiple-choice question-answering, comparatively little research has studied the impact of test set contamination on generative evaluations. In this work, we quantitatively assess the effect of test set contamination on generative evaluations through the language model lifecycle. We pretrain language models on mixtures of web data and the MATH benchmark, sweeping model sizes and number of test set replicas contaminating the pretraining corpus; performance improves with contamination and model size. Using scaling laws, we make a surprising discovery: including even a single test set replica enables models to achieve lower loss than the irreducible error of training on the uncontaminated corpus. We then study further training: overtraining with fresh data reduces the effects of contamination, whereas supervised finetuning on the training set can either increase or decrease performance on test data, depending on the amount of pretraining contamination. Finally, at inference, we identify factors that modulate memorization: high sampling temperatures mitigate contamination effects, and longer solutions are exponentially more difficult to memorize than shorter ones, presenting a contrast with discriminative evaluations, where solutions are only a few tokens in length. By characterizing how generation and memorization interact, we highlight a new layer of complexity for trustworthy evaluation of AI systems.

生成模型评估可信性测试污染记忆机制

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