Skip to content
Back to the collection

Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models

Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramer, Eric Wallace

Show all 12 authors

Matthew Jagielski, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Katherine Lee, Adam Roberts, Tom Brown, Dawn Song, Ulfar Erlingsson, Alina Oprea, Colin Raffel

2020 · arXiv

Read the paper
HN score
0
Mentions
3
Readers
3
Months
3
What’s in a score?

From the abstract

It has become common to publish large (billion parameter) language models that have been trained on private datasets. This paper demonstrates that in such settings, an adversary can perform a training data extraction attack to recover individual training examples by querying the language model. We demonstrate our attack on GPT-2, a language model trained on scrapes of the public Internet, and are able to extract hundreds of verbatim text sequences from the model's training data. These extracted examples include (public) personally identifiable information (names, phone numbers, and email addresses), IRC conversations, code, and 128-bit UUIDs. Our attack is possible even though each of the above sequences are included in just one document in the training data. We comprehensively evaluate our extraction attack to understand the factors that contribute to its success. Worryingly, we find that larger models are more vulnerable than smaller models. We conclude by drawing lessons and discussing possible safeguards for training large language models.

Metadata: arXiv. Abstracts retain their original authors’ rights.

In the conversation

Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels

3 selected excerpts · 3 total mentions

qayxc
Neutral mention · rule
> Would it be OK if I launched a tech preview of my AI poem writer companion that would copy lines but also complete stanzas from famous poets, rock bands and singer-songwriters? Yes it would be if it only happened ~0.1% of the time and if quoting verbatim wasn't the intended function of the system but merely a side-effect. In fact, that's what artists sometimes do deliberately. It's what happens with other GANs as well and all that needs to happen is to educate users about the possibility of this. As long as you don't take ownership of the output produced by your AI (and neither do Microsoft), it's at the discretion of the user what they use the generated content for and in which context. It has been demonstrated that training data can be extracted from any large NLP model [0] so this wouldn't come as a surprise either. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-gpt-leaking-your-data-...

Keep following the thread.

More in Language models

More from the same topics.