Dataset contamination, where evaluation datasets overlap with pre-training corpora, inflates performance metrics and undermines the reliability of model evaluations. Measuring dataset contamination thus becomes essential to ensure that performance evaluations genuinely reflect a model’s ability to generalize to unseen data, rather than relying on memorized examples. To address this problem, we propose Kernel Divergence Score (KDS), a novel method that evaluates dataset contamination by computing the divergence between the kernel similarity matrix of sample embeddings, before and after fine-tuning on the benchmark dataset. Leveraging the insight that fine-tuning affects unseen samples more significantly than seen ones, KDS provides a reliable measure of contamination. Through extensive experiments on controlled contamination scenarios, KDS demonstrates a near-perfect correlation with contamination levels and outperforms existing baselines. Additionally, we perform comprehensive ablation studies to analyze the impact of key design choices, providing deeper insights into the components and effectiveness of KDS. These ablations highlight the importance of leveraging fine-grained kernel-based information and confirm the reliability of the proposed framework across diverse datasets and settings. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/kernel-divergence-score.

Aligning large language models with human objectives is paramount, yet common approaches including RLHF suffer from unstable and resource-intensive training. In response to this challenge, we introduce ARGS, Alignment as Reward-Guided Search, a novel framework that integrates alignment into the decoding process, eliminating the need for expensive RL training. By adjusting the model’s probabilistic predictions using a reward signal, ARGS generates texts with semantic diversity while being aligned with human preferences, offering a promising and flexible solution for aligning language models. Notably, our method demonstrates consistent enhancements in average reward compared to baselines across diverse alignment tasks and various model dimensions. For example, under the same greedy-based decoding strategy, our method improves the average reward by 19.56% relative to the baseline and secures a preference or tie score of 64.33% in GPT-4 evaluation. We believe that our framework, emphasizing test-time alignment, paves the way for more responsive language models in the future. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/args.