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

TL;DR

This paper proposes practical strategies to prevent data contamination in model evaluation by encrypting test data, enforcing training exclusion controls, and avoiding internet-sourced data with solutions.

Contribution

It introduces three actionable strategies to mitigate data contamination, addressing challenges in maintaining clean test datasets for model evaluation.

Findings

Encrypted test data prevents unauthorized access.

Training exclusion controls can be enforced via API policies.

Avoiding internet-sourced data reduces contamination risk.

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.