arXiv:2608. 00144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Membership inference (MIA) on language models is usually summarised by an aggregate ROC-AUC, but such evaluations are confounded: model-free blind baselines separate members from non-members from surface text alone.
By Victor Maricato
The paper introduces Word-level Probability MIA (WPMIA), a black-box membership inference attack that estimates word-level generation probabilities via Monte Carlo sampling and local kernel smoothing, then aggregates them into a sequence-level likelihood estimator. By conditioning on different prefixes, WPMIA amplifies distributional differences between member and non-member texts, outperforming existing black-box baselines on open-source LLMs and achieving an average TPR@5%FPR of 42.0 on proprietary models such as GPT‑5‑Chat, Gemini‑2.5‑Flash, and Claude‑4.5‑Haiku.
By Shengjie Niu, Yeheng Ge, Jian Huang
The paper audits the widely used ISOT/Kaggle Fake and Real News corpus and finds that extremely high reported accuracies (≈0.98) are largely due to shortcut signals rather than genuine veracity detection. A simple TF‑IDF linear classifier achieves perfect F1 when using only subject metadata, and even after removing metadata, newswire tags, and duplicate documents, the F1 drops only modestly, indicating that editorial style rather than specific tokens drives performance. Under topic‑disjoint and temporal transfer tests, performance collapses, and models transfer poorly to the independent LIAR benchmark, showing that within‑corpus scores reflect source and topic separability, not truth verification.
whyItMatters:"The study demonstrates that current high accuracy metrics on this fake‑news dataset are misleading, highlighting the need for more robust evaluation protocols that guard against shortcut learning."
By Yuvraj Verma
arXiv:2607. 04223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) reduces but does not eliminate hallucination, and existing detectors return a single answer-level score that does not indicate which sentence is unsupported, or why.
By Mohamed Aly Bouke
The paper investigates whether language models can identify sentences from their training data by using exact duplication counts from publicly released corpora for two model families, OLMo‑2 and Pythia. It finds that for typical duplication levels, models show only a weak trace of exposure, with a rank correlation near –0.08, and that strong signals only appear when a sentence appears roughly a thousand times, at which point fame rather than memory dominates. The study also demonstrates that common membership tests can be misleading, as changing a single word does not alter the model’s preference, and that controlling for register can significantly improve detector performance.
By Arman Nik Khah
The paper introduces a new taxonomy for benchmark contamination that categorizes leakage by the mitigation it defeats—direct, derivative, temporal, distributional, and acquired—covering both training‑time and evaluation‑time scenarios. It proposes a four‑field disclosure protocol to record contamination status alongside benchmark scores, and provides a JSON schema, validator, and examples. An empirical study of 41 documents using a pre‑registered instrument shows limited reporting of contamination types and variable reliability, highlighting gaps in current disclosure practices.
By Johanna Angulo, V\'ictor Yeste, Hector Espinos-Morato