STAMP Your Content: Proving Dataset Membership via Watermarked Rephrasings

Given how large parts of the publicly available text are crawled to pretrain large language models (LLMs), creators increasingly worry about the inclusion of their proprietary data for model training without attribution or licensing. Their concerns are also shared by benchmark curators whose test-sets might be compromised. In this paper, we present STAMP, a framework for detecting dataset membership—i.e., determining the inclusion of a dataset in the pretraining corpora of LLMs. Given an original piece of content, our proposal involves generating multiple watermarked rephrases such that a distinct watermark is embedded in each rephrasing. One version is released publicly while others are kept private. Subsequently, creators can compare model likelihoods between public and private versions using paired statistical tests to prove membership. We show that our framework can successfully detect contamination across four benchmarks which appear only once in the training data and constitute less than 0.001% of the total tokens, outperforming several contamination detection and dataset inference baselines. We verify that our approach preserves both the semantic meaning and the utility of benchmarks in comparing different models. We apply STAMP to two real-world scenarios to confirm the inclusion of paper abstracts and blog articles in the pretraining corpora.