Data Contamination Can Cross Language Barriers
Authors: name: Feng Yao, name: Yufan Zhuang, name: Zihao Sun, name: Sunan Xu, name: Animesh Kumar, name: Jingbo Shang

The opacity in developing large language models (LLMs) is raising growing
concerns about the potential contamination of public benchmarks in the
pre-training data. Existing contamination detection methods are typically based
on the text overlap between training and evaluation data, which can be too
superficial to reflect deeper forms of contamination. In this paper, we first
present a cross-lingual form of contamination that inflates LLMs' performance
while evading current detection methods, deliberately injected by overfitting
LLMs on the translated versions of benchmark test sets. Then, we propose
generalization-based approaches to unmask such deeply concealed contamination.
Specifically, we examine the LLM's performance change after modifying the
original benchmark by replacing the false answer choices with correct ones from
other questions. Contaminated models can hardly generalize to such easier
situations, where the false choices can be not even wrong, as all
choices are correct in their memorization. Experimental results demonstrate
that cross-lingual contamination can easily fool existing detection methods,
but not ours. In addition, we discuss the potential utilization of
cross-lingual contamination in interpreting LLMs' working mechanisms and in
post-training LLMs for enhanced multilingual capabilities. The code and dataset
we use can be obtained from https://github.com/ShangDataLab/Deep-Contam.