Question: How does this idea guarantee that the contamination did not happen on purpose otherwise or accidentally through articles like this ? (Not speaking for the companies since I am quite sure that they don’t care… Just a practical consideration.)
This doesn’t guarantee it, you’re right. But the obvious way to filter canaried data out is to simply remove any document that has the string inside it. To further filter for articles that only talk about the canary instead of intending to use it seems like a needlessly expensive task, given how few such articles there would be.
Further, given that one use of the canary is to tell whether contamination has happened by checking if the model knows the string, not filtering such articles out would still not be great.
All that said however, I think the fact that GPT-4 had memorized BIG-Bench tasks—which certainly used the canary—means that the contamination could have happened from anything that had the canary in it.
Question: How does this idea guarantee that the contamination did not happen on purpose otherwise or accidentally through articles like this ? (Not speaking for the companies since I am quite sure that they don’t care… Just a practical consideration.)
This doesn’t guarantee it, you’re right. But the obvious way to filter canaried data out is to simply remove any document that has the string inside it. To further filter for articles that only talk about the canary instead of intending to use it seems like a needlessly expensive task, given how few such articles there would be.
Further, given that one use of the canary is to tell whether contamination has happened by checking if the model knows the string, not filtering such articles out would still not be great.
All that said however, I think the fact that GPT-4 had memorized BIG-Bench tasks—which certainly used the canary—means that the contamination could have happened from anything that had the canary in it.