[HN Gopher] Scalable extraction of training data from (productio...
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       Scalable extraction of training data from (production) language
       models
        
       Author : wazokazi
       Score  : 95 points
       Date   : 2023-12-02 07:32 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | skilled wrote:
       | Related (blog post from the team),
       | 
       |  _Extracting training data from ChatGPT_
       | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38458683) (126 comments)
       | 
       | And direct link,
       | 
       | https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-...
        
       | xsbos wrote:
       | This is probably an unintended feature bit I see no immediate
       | problem in alignment not erasing raw memorized data. It could as
       | well be a design choice to have a raw memory unaffected by
       | alignment procedures
        
       | GaggiX wrote:
       | >This leads to a natural question that has not yet been dis-
       | cussed in the literature: if we could query a model infinitely,
       | how much memorization could we extract in total?
       | 
       | You will get every 50-grams, not because the model memorized all
       | of them but by pure chance. It seems pretty obvious to me.
       | 
       | It makes me question if there were some cases where the model
       | output an identical 50-grams but it wasn't present in the
       | training dataset of the model, like in a very structured setting,
       | like assembly code where there is usually a very limited number
       | of keywords used.
        
         | dwringer wrote:
         | One can fine tune a smaller parameter model like GPT-NeoX on a
         | home GPU pretty readily, and it's absolutely capable of doing
         | what you specified. Teach it with a bunch of example sentences
         | that have parts of speech like verb and noun following a simple
         | grammar, and you will see it generate sentences afterward that
         | combine the parts of speech grammatically in novel ways, using
         | the same grammatical structures but forming productions that
         | did not appear in the training set.
         | 
         | Depending on settings, they are also capable of producing a lot
         | of ungrammatical nonsense, but the odds of what it produces are
         | changed considerably by the training.
        
           | GaggiX wrote:
           | No I mean creating 50-grams that appear in the dataset
           | created by the paper linked by OP, but not present in the
           | actual dataset the model was trained on. Of course, the model
           | would be able to output 50-grams that were not present in
           | either.
        
             | dwringer wrote:
             | As I understand you, what you state is exactly what I
             | meant. If you train with a bunch of text containing
             | substrings of those 50-grams, but not the full 50-grams
             | themselves [or, expose it to the same vocabulary used in
             | the same parts of speech as in the full 50], the model will
             | pretty readily produce the full 50-grams despite never
             | having seen them in their entirety. Try it out, it's pretty
             | easy to do on a modern GPU and can be done in less than an
             | hour.
        
       | MrThoughtful wrote:
       | An LLM remembers like a human. Mostly concepts, but some things
       | it remembers verbatim.
       | 
       | Why is it a problem if a LLM tells you what it knows?
       | 
       | Are LLMs trained on secret data?
        
         | _ink_ wrote:
         | > Are LLMs trained on secret data?
         | 
         | Probably. And on copyrighted data probably as well.
        
         | kevindamm wrote:
         | DeepMind recently extracted PII from ChatGPT by prompting
         | (e.g., telling the LLM to repeat 'poem' indefinitely will cause
         | a long sequence of that word until popping out of it and
         | revealing by accident some PII from a person's email
         | signature).
         | 
         | So, yes.
        
       | samuell wrote:
       | Interesting! This aligns with my hunch that we might soon start
       | to actually store much of data in models rather than unwieldly
       | datasets :) ... as I've been writing about:
       | 
       | https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/the-future-of-data-less...
        
       | jerpint wrote:
       | Using memorization is something that can be a feature in some
       | cases, especially in reducing hallucinations. Perhaps instead of
       | embedding retrieval you'd condition a model to only repeat
       | memorized relevant passages, something that can be trained end to
       | end and beneficial for RAG
        
       | hpcjoe wrote:
       | A friend sent me the image from page 9. The email signature. It
       | is mine, from when I ran my company. Mid 2010s.
       | 
       | I'm not much worried about this specific example of information
       | exfiltration, though I have significant concerns over how one may
       | debug something like this for applications working with
       | potentially more sensitive data than email signatures. Put
       | another way, I think we are well within the infancy of this
       | technology, and there is far more work needed before we have
       | actually useful applications that have a concept of information
       | security relative to their training data sets.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | That's an unexpected surprise. Do you have any theories?
         | Presumably someone posted one of your e-mails somewhere on the
         | internet?
         | 
         | If you Google parts of the old signature, do you get any
         | results?
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-02 23:02 UTC)