Elephants Never Forget: Memorization and Learning of Tabular Data in Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06209v3
• Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2024 10:33:18 GMT
• Title: Elephants Never Forget: Memorization and Learning of Tabular Data in Large Language Models
• Authors: Sebastian Bordt, Harsha Nori, Vanessa Rodrigues, Besmira Nushi, Rich Caruana,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, but the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. This work introduces a variety of different techniques to assess whether a language model has seen a dataset during training. We then compare the few-shot learning performance of LLMs on datasets that were seen during training to the performance on datasets released after training.
• Score: 21.10890310571397
• License:
• Abstract: While many have shown how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. In this work, we address this concern for tabular data. Specifically, we introduce a variety of different techniques to assess whether a language model has seen a tabular dataset during training. This investigation reveals that LLMs have memorized many popular tabular datasets verbatim. We then compare the few-shot learning performance of LLMs on datasets that were seen during training to the performance on datasets released after training. We find that LLMs perform better on datasets seen during training, indicating that memorization leads to overfitting. At the same time, LLMs show non-trivial performance on novel datasets and are surprisingly robust to data transformations. We then investigate the in-context statistical learning abilities of LLMs. While LLMs are significantly better than random at solving statistical classification problems, the sample efficiency of few-shot learning lags behind traditional statistical learning algorithms, especially as the dimension of the problem increases. This suggests that much of the observed few-shot performance on novel real-world datasets is due to the LLM's world knowledge. Overall, our results highlight the importance of testing whether an LLM has seen an evaluation dataset during pre-training. We release the https://github.com/interpretml/LLM-Tabular-Memorization-Checker Python package to test LLMs for memorization of tabular datasets.

Related papers

• Scalable In-Context Learning on Tabular Data via Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models [15.603556124006479]
  We propose retrieval-augmented language models for scalable TabICL. Our approach incorporates a customized retrieval module, combined with retrieval-guided instruction-tuning for LLMs. This enables LLMs to effectively leverage larger datasets, achieving significantly improved performance across 69 widely recognized datasets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-02-05T13:16:41Z)
• Transfer Learning of Tabular Data by Finetuning Large Language Models [0.0]
  This paper investigates the effectiveness of an application programming interface (API) and transfer learning of large language models (LLM) LLM APIs respond to input text prompts with tokenized data and instructions, whereas transfer learning finetunes an LLM for a target classification task. This paper proposes an end-to-end finetuning of LLM to demonstrate cross-data transfer learning on ten benchmark data sets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-12T16:23:18Z)
• Towards Robust Evaluation of Unlearning in LLMs via Data Transformations [17.927224387698903]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be a great success in a wide range of applications ranging from regular NLP-based use cases to AI agents. In recent times research in the area of Machine Unlearning (MUL) has become active. Main idea is to force LLMs to forget (unlearn) certain information (e.g., PII) without suffering from performance loss on regular tasks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-23T07:20:36Z)
• Formality is Favored: Unraveling the Learning Preferences of Large Language Models on Data with Conflicting Knowledge [55.65162959527848]
  Large language models have shown excellent performance on many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, pretraining data tends to contain misleading and even conflicting information. This study systematically analyze LLMs' learning preferences for data with conflicting knowledge.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-07T06:49:41Z)
• 60 Data Points are Sufficient to Fine-Tune LLMs for Question-Answering [50.12622877002846]
  Large language models (LLMs) encode extensive world knowledge through pre-training on massive datasets, which can be fine-tuned for the question-answering (QA) task. We categorize supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data based on the extent of knowledge memorized by the pretrained LLMs. Our experiments show that as few as 60 data points during the SFT stage can activate the knowledge encoded during pre-training, enabling LLMs to perform the QA task.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-24T07:38:38Z)
• SELF-GUIDE: Better Task-Specific Instruction Following via Self-Synthetic Finetuning [70.21358720599821]
  Large language models (LLMs) hold the promise of solving diverse tasks when provided with appropriate natural language prompts. We propose SELF-GUIDE, a multi-stage mechanism in which we synthesize task-specific input-output pairs from the student LLM. We report an absolute improvement of approximately 15% for classification tasks and 18% for generation tasks in the benchmark's metrics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-16T04:41:58Z)
• Large Language Models Memorize Sensor Datasets! Implications on Human Activity Recognition Research [0.23982628363233693]
  We investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) have had access to standard Human Activity Recognition (HAR) datasets during training. Most contemporary LLMs are trained on virtually the entire (accessible) internet -- potentially including standard HAR datasets. For the Daphnet dataset in particular, GPT-4 is able to reproduce blocks of sensor readings.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-09T19:38:27Z)
• LLM2LLM: Boosting LLMs with Novel Iterative Data Enhancement [79.31084387589968]
  Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are currently state-of-the-art for solving the vast majority of natural language processing tasks. We propose LLM2LLM, a data augmentation strategy that uses a teacher LLM to enhance a small seed dataset. We achieve improvements up to 24.2% on the GSM8K dataset, 32.6% on CaseHOLD, 32.0% on SNIPS, 52.6% on TREC and 39.8% on SST-2 over regular fine-tuning in the low-data regime.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-22T08:57:07Z)
• Elephants Never Forget: Testing Language Models for Memorization of Tabular Data [21.912611415307644]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, but the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. We introduce a variety of different techniques to assess the degrees of contamination, including statistical tests for conditional distribution modeling and four tests that identify memorization.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-11T12:07:13Z)
• TRACE: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Continual Learning in Large Language Models [52.734140807634624]
  Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. Existing continual learning benchmarks lack sufficient challenge for leading aligned LLMs. We introduce TRACE, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in LLMs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-10T16:38:49Z)
• CulturaX: A Cleaned, Enormous, and Multilingual Dataset for Large Language Models in 167 Languages [86.90220551111096]
  Training datasets for large language models (LLMs) are often not fully disclosed. We present CulturaX, a substantial multilingual dataset with 6.3 trillion tokens in 167 languages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-09-17T23:49:10Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.