Many-Shot Regurgitation Prompting

We introduce Many-Shot Regurgitation (MSR) prompting, a new black-box membership inference attack framework for examining verbatim content reproduction in large language models (LLMs). MSR prompting involves dividing the input text into multiple segments and creating a single prompt that includes a series of faux conversation rounds between a user and a language model to elicit verbatim regurgitation. We apply MSR prompting to diverse text sources, including open educational resources textbooks and Wikipedia articles, which provide high-quality, factual content and are continuously updated over time. For each source, we curate two dataset types: one that LLMs were likely exposed to during training (D_pre) and another consisting of documents published after the models’ training cutoff dates (D_post). To quantify the occurrence of verbatim matches, we employ the Longest Common Substring algorithm and count the frequency of matches at different length thresholds. We then use statistical measures such as Cliff’s delta, Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) distance, and Kruskal-Wallis H test to determine whether the distribution of verbatim matches differs significantly between D_pre and D_post. Our findings reveal a striking difference in the distribution of verbatim matches between D_pre and D_post, with the frequency of verbatim reproduction being significantly higher when LLMs (e.g. GPT models and LLaMAs) are prompted with text from datasets they were likely trained on. Our results provide compelling evidence that LLMs are more prone to reproducing verbatim content when the input text is likely sourced from their training data. Code is available here.