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The Mosaic Memory of Large Language Models

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arxiv 2405.15523 v2 pith:YQMS7XRY submitted 2024-05-24 cs.CL cs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.LG
keywords memorizationllmsmosaicdatamemorymodelssequenceswidely
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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As Large Language Models (LLMs) become widely adopted, understanding how they learn from, and memorize, training data becomes crucial. Memorization in LLMs is widely assumed to only occur as a result of sequences being repeated in the training data. Instead, we show that LLMs memorize by assembling information from similar sequences, a phenomena we call mosaic memory. We show major LLMs to exhibit mosaic memory, with fuzzy duplicates contributing to memorization as much as 0.8 of an exact duplicate and even heavily modified sequences contributing substantially to memorization. Despite models display reasoning capabilities, we somewhat surprisingly show memorization to be predominantly syntactic rather than semantic. We finally show fuzzy duplicates to be ubiquitous in real-world data, untouched by deduplication techniques. Taken together, our results challenge widely held beliefs and show memorization to be a more complex, mosaic process, with real-world implications for privacy, confidentiality, model utility and evaluation.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. When Tables Leak: Attacking String Memorization in LLM-Based Tabular Data Generation

    cs.LG 2025-12 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    LLM tabular generators leak memorized numeric strings, allowing a no-box attack to achieve near-perfect membership inference on some state-of-the-art models.

  2. DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models

    cs.LG 2024-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    DCLM-Baseline dataset lets a 7B model reach 64% 5-shot MMLU accuracy after 2.6T tokens, beating prior open-data models by 6.6 points on MMLU with 40% less compute.

  3. Merlin: Deterministic Byte-Exact Deduplication for Lossless Context Optimization in Large Language Model Inference

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    Merlin achieves byte-exact deduplication of text at up to 8.7 GB/s using SIMD-optimized hashing, reducing LLM context sizes by 13.9-71% with no data loss.

  4. Byte-Exact Deduplication in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Three-Regime Empirical Analysis Across Public Benchmarks

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    Byte-exact deduplication reduces RAG context size by 0.16% to 80.34% across three regimes with zero measurable quality regression per multi-vendor LLM evaluation.

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