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Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models

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arxiv 2012.07805 v2 pith:M65JF4TW submitted 2020-12-14 cs.CR cs.CLcs.LG

classification cs.CRcs.CLcs.LG
keywords traininglanguagemodelsattackdatalargemodelexamples
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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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.

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Cited by 15 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 275 citations worldwide. Full citation record

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  4. Evaluating Differentially Private Generation of Domain-Specific Text

    cs.LG 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Applying a new benchmark to five specialized domains, the paper shows current privacy-preserving text generators lose much of their utility and fidelity, especially at strict privacy levels and on gated datasets.

  5. AnalogFed: Privacy-Preserving Discovery of Analog Circuits at Scale with Federated Generative AI

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  10. Layer-Wise Perturbations via Sparse Autoencoders for Adversarial Text Generation

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  11. On the Performance of Differentially Private Optimization with Heavy-Tail Class Imbalance

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    Under heavy-tail class imbalance, subtracting the DP noise variance from Adam's second moment (DP-AdamBC) substantially improves learning of rare classes compared with DP gradient descent.

  12. Low-Perplexity LLM-Generated Sequences and Where To Find Them

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    Only about 40% of low-perplexity 6-token spans generated by Pythia-6.9B can be exactly matched to The Pile, and the authors categorize matched and unmatched spans into four classes.

  13. From Teacher to Student: Tracking Memorization Through Model Distillation

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Distillation of fine-tuned GPT-2 teachers into smaller students lowers verbatim memorization of training responses compared to direct fine-tuning, with reverse-KL giving the lowest rates.

  14. Preventing Another Tessa: Modular Safety Middleware For Health-Adjacent AI Assistants

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  15. Model Inversion Attacks on Llama 3: Extracting PII from Large Language Models

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