Model Dementia: Generated Data Makes Models Forget
Authors: Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Yarin Gal, Nicolas Papernot, Ross Anderson
AI-generated Key Points
- Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-2, GPT-3(.5), and GPT-4 have revolutionized image creation from descriptive text.
- LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance across various language tasks and have been introduced to the general public through platforms like ChatGPT.
- The concept of "model dementia" refers to irreversible defects in generative models caused by using model-generated content in training.
- Model dementia can occur not only in LLMs but also in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs).
- Learning with generated data is possible, but it leads to degraded performance in models over generations.
- Just training a single moderately large model produces twice the American lifetime worth of CO2; hence an experiment demonstrating model dementia was not run.
- Data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of content generated by LLMs in data crawled from the Internet.
- It is essential to take model dementia seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web.
Abstract: Stable Diffusion revolutionised image creation from descriptive text. GPT-2, GPT-3(.5) and GPT-4 demonstrated astonishing performance across a variety of language tasks. ChatGPT introduced such language models to the general public. It is now clear that large language models (LLMs) are here to stay, and will bring about drastic change in the whole ecosystem of online text and images. In this paper we consider what the future might hold. What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We call this effect model dementia and show that it can occur in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and LLMs. We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity amongst all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it has to be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web. Indeed, the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of content generated by LLMs in data crawled from the Internet.
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