Challenge: Recent studies have shown that large language models are contaminated with data from pretraining and finetuning tasks.
Approach: They perform extensive analysis on the factors that affect model memorization and generalization, such as model size, problem difficulty, and question length.
Outcome: The results show that models perform better on the subset of the benchmarks where similar solutions are seen during training.

Similar Papers

Unveiling the Spectrum of Data Contamination in Language Model: A Survey from Detection to Remediation (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Data contamination is a problem in Large language models due to the reliance on extensive internet-derived training corpora.
Approach: They present a survey on the topic of data contamination in large language models.
Outcome: The results of the first survey on data contamination in large language models provide a comprehensive guide for NLP researchers seeking a systematic understanding of the issue.
NLP Evaluation in trouble: On the Need to Measure LLM Data Contamination for each Benchmark (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating large language models using annotated benchmarks are in trouble . data contamination can cause wrong scientific conclusions being published .
Approach: They argue that the evaluation of NLP tasks using annotated benchmarks is in trouble . they define different levels of data contamination and propose a community effort .
Outcome: The proposed measures should detect when data from a benchmark was exposed to a model and flag papers with conclusions compromised by data contamination.
Benchmarking Large Language Models Under Data Contamination: A Survey from Static to Dynamic Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: In the era of evaluating large language models, data contamination is an increasingly prominent concern . static benchmarking has been used for evaluation, but there are limitations of *dynamic* benchmarks .
Approach: They propose a series of optimal design principles for *dynamic* benchmarking and analyze the limitations of existing *static* benchmarks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks highlight a critical gap in the evaluation of LLMs.
An Open-Source Data Contamination Report for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing contamination analysis is conducted internally by large language model developers and lacks transparency and completeness.
Approach: They present a data contamination report for 15 popular large language models . they propose an open-source pipeline to perform contamination analysis on customised data .
Outcome: The proposed pipeline enables the community to perform contamination analysis on customised data and models.
On Leakage of Code Generation Evaluation Datasets (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: In this paper, we discuss contamination by code generation test sets in large language models.
Approach: They propose to use Python to test code generation test sets for contamination . they find that code generation is an important skill for large language models to master .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks are uncontaminated and provide a new insight into code generation.
Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks for large language models are inflated and inconsistent with actual performance.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-based system to explore potential overlaps between benchmarks and pretraining corpora and a protocol to investigate testset slot guessing.
Outcome: The proposed method exploits overlaps between evaluation benchmarks and pretraining corpora and masks a wrong answer in a multiple choice question and prompts the model to fill in the gap.
Does Data Contamination Detection Work (Well) for LLMs? A Survey and Evaluation on Detection Assumptions (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Large language models have demonstrated great performance across various benchmarks, but data contamination is a concern in their evaluation.
Approach: They analyze 50 papers on data contamination detection and test three of them as case studies to identify the possibility of data contamination.
Outcome: The proposed methods can detect membership inference attacks on instance-level data, and can perform similar to random guessing on LLM pretraining datasets.
Towards Data Contamination Detection for Modern Large Language Models: Limitations, Inconsistencies, and Oracle Challenges (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for detecting data contamination in large language models have limitations and limitations . data contamination occurs when test or evaluation data is exposed to the model during its training phases .
Approach: They evaluate five different methods for detecting data contamination in large language models . they find that current methods have non-trivial limitations in their assumptions and practical applications .
Outcome: The proposed methods have non-trivial limitations and difficulties in detecting contamination . the authors highlight the complexity of contamination detection in advanced LLMs .
Generalization or Memorization: Data Contamination and Trustworthy Evaluation for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Considering the vast size and wide-ranging sources of LLMs’ training data, it could explicitly or implicitly include test data.
Approach: They propose a Contamination Detection via output Distribution (CDD) which detects data contamination only by identifying the peakedness of LLM's output distribution.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance by 21.8%-30.2% on humanEval and TED: trustworthy evaluation via output distribution.
Data Contamination Can Cross Language Barriers (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to detect contamination of public benchmarks are too superficial to reflect deeper forms of contamination.
Approach: They propose generalization-based approaches to unmask a cross-lingual form of contamination that inflates LLMs’ performance while evading current detection methods.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing detection methods while avoiding contamination of public benchmarks in the pre-training data.

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