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<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget · HackerPapers discussions</title><link>https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/</link><description>Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.</description><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMT</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42286395</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:2305.17493:42286395</guid><pubDate>Sun, 01 Dec 2024 05:21:45 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;The Curse of Recursion: Training on generated data makes models forget (2023)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;122 points; 107 discussion replies on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by groby_b</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40815285</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:40815285</guid><pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2024 21:23:22 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re confusing it with data poisoning. Model collapse itself is(was?) a fairly serious research topic: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493 We&amp;#x27;ve by now reached a &amp;quot;probably not inevitable&amp;quot; - https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 argues there&amp;#x27;s a finite upper bound to error - but I&amp;#x27;d also point out that that paper assumes training data cardinality increases with the number of training generations and is strictly accumulative. To a first order, that means you better have a pre-2022 dataset to get started, and have archived it well. but it&amp;#x27;s probably fair to say current SOTA is still more or less &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by vineyardlabs</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40311238</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:40311238</guid><pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2024 18:21:16 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493 There&amp;#x27;s some cursory indication that in the long tail, training LLMs on LLM-generated data causes model collapse. Kind of like how if you photocopy a photocopy too many times the document becomes unreadable. This isn&amp;#x27;t really surprising though. Neural networks at large are a form of lossy compression. You can&amp;#x27;t do lossy compression on artifacts recovered from lossy compression too many times. The losses stack.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by dangerwill</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40058835</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:40058835</guid><pubDate>Tue, 16 Apr 2024 23:55:32 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Paradoxically, I think a lot of research is showing that synthetic training information can be just as good as the real stuff. Which studies show this? https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493 shows the exact opposite and my (layman&amp;#x27;s) understanding of statistics and epistemology lines up entirely with this finding. Like, how could this even theoretically work? In the best case scenario wouldn&amp;#x27;t training on synthetic training data make LLMs overconfident / overfit the data once faced with new (human) input to respond to?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by almatabata</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39608516</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:39608516</guid><pubDate>Tue, 05 Mar 2024 20:04:13 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;There is the threat of model collapse though as discussed in this paper: https://browse.arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493v2.pdf? They discuss that if you train models with the output of other models you can get worse results. If we all start using code from those models how will that impact GPT-5?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by gwern</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39515267</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:39515267</guid><pubDate>Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:47:57 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For better or worse, the quality of output LLMs can produce based on such publicly available data appears to be peaking. Recent work has documented that GPT, for example, has begun to exhibit declines in the quality of its output.3 It suggests no such thing, and the problems with citation 3 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09009) have been extensively discussed. &amp;gt; It has been suggested this decline in performance is the expected result of a feedback loop, wherein data collected for training is increasingly contaminated by GPT itself, as users leverage the technology to produce and post content…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by hprotagonist</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39398141</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:39398141</guid><pubDate>Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:16:49 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; AI used to be weird. Now ‘sounds like a bot’ is just shorthand for boring. It&amp;#x27;s real, real hard to escape regression to the mean in autonomous systems. That gaussian&amp;#x27;s gonna get ya. [1] I. Shumailov, Z. Shumaylov, Y. Zhao, Y. Gal, N. Papernot, and R. Anderson, “The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget,” May 2023, [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by TimurSadekov</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38965750</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:38965750</guid><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jan 2024 09:04:21 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;One of the world&amp;#x27;s leading experts on information security systems, Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University, in his article https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 is already considering a scenario where most of the Internet will be a neural network-generated hallucination. But neither you, nor me, nor any expert or anyone at all will be able to distinguish between fake and real. As a result, neural networks will degenerate in the process of learning from their own hallucinations of the Internet, and humans will degenerate in the process of applying the degenerated neural networks. This…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by TimurSadekov</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38965676</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:38965676</guid><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jan 2024 08:51:53 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Neural networks will degenerate in the process of learning from their own hallucinations, and humans will degenerate in the process of applying the degenerated neural networks. This process is called &amp;quot;neural network collapse&amp;quot;. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 It can only be countered by a collective neural network of all the minds of humanity. For mutual validation and self-improvement of LLM and humans, we need the ability to match the knowledge of artificial intelligence with collective intelligence. Only the CyberPravda project is the practical solution to avoid the collapse of large…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by kristopolous</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38201806</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:38201806</guid><pubDate>Thu, 09 Nov 2023 06:25:28 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;maybe. A lot of modern clickwork is actually model training and there is a model-collapse phenomena (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493) which means that it should be banned for such work. I bet a number of clever people on the platforms are already trying to instrument AI to do the work regardless - it&amp;#x27;s pretty close to &amp;quot;free money&amp;quot; if you can pull it off and not get caught and at a spigot size where there&amp;#x27;s no real serious consequences if you do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by kristopolous</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37033501</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:37033501</guid><pubDate>Mon, 07 Aug 2023 12:29:26 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;multi-generational degradation is broadly called &amp;quot;model collapse&amp;quot; https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493.pdf&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by YeGoblynQueenne</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36963999</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:36963999</guid><pubDate>Tue, 01 Aug 2023 22:19:47 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; There&amp;#x27;s already been the studies that these models quickly break down when they&amp;#x27;re fed their own generated data as training data Not &amp;quot;these models&amp;quot; if you&amp;#x27;re referring to large language models pretrained and fine-tuned with Transformers. The only study I am aware of that explored the effect you discuss [1] had to make do with very different models as proxies: Variational Autoencoders, Mixture of Gaussians and a smaller LLM with 125 million parameters that hardly qualifies as one. It is not safe to extrapolate those results to really Large-LMs trained with Transformers, as it is not safe to…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by concinds</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818902</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:36818902</guid><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2023 20:01:55 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally untrue, and disheartening that it&amp;#x27;s the top comment. You can&amp;#x27;t use a model&amp;#x27;s output to train another model, it leads to complete gibberish (termed &amp;quot;model collapse&amp;quot;). https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 And the Llama 2 license allows users to train derivative models, which is what people really care about. https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/blob/main/LICENSE&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by martin_a</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36653322</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:36653322</guid><pubDate>Sun, 09 Jul 2023 10:37:14 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;There are first studies on this topic: &amp;quot;THE CURSE OF RECURSION: TRAINING ON GENERATED DATA MAKES MODELS FORGET&amp;quot; https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493.pdf&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by jerjerjer</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36570368</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:36570368</guid><pubDate>Mon, 03 Jul 2023 08:42:45 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by throwaway4aday</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36540836</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:36540836</guid><pubDate>Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:28:04 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;That paper[0] mentions two defects, catastrophic forgetting which occurs during continual learning. GPT type models do not use this type of training and use supervised training instead which utilizes a curated corpus of text. The second is model collapse which is essentially just bad data making its way into the training set, once again a sufficiently curated corpus eliminates this problem. Microsoft has published a few papers about their research in using LLMs to train new LLM models. They have used training data consisting of essentially recorded chatGPT interactions which consist of the…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by carbocation</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36512737</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:36512737</guid><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jun 2023 21:17:58 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Appears to be susceptible to model collapse[1], depending on how you do it. 1 = https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by qayxc</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452728</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:36452728</guid><pubDate>Fri, 23 Jun 2023 22:01:27 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Related: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 Basically, if this paper is right, 2021 was the last year usable training data could be pulled from the internet. It could be all downhill from hereon out, as the amount of AI generated content will soon overtake actual human generated and -curated data on the internet. So the party could be over soon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — mentioned by spacemanspiff01</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328848</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:2305.17493:36328848</guid><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jun 2023 16:56:39 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;I believe that performance degrades, as the models end up training on data that is more homogenized and less diverse when compared to original data. At least according to this paper (I think, FYI I am not a expert) https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36319076</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:2305.17493:36319076</guid><pubDate>Tue, 13 Jun 2023 23:25:05 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;170 points; 117 discussion replies on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item><item><title>The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175775</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:2305.17493:36175775</guid><pubDate>Sat, 03 Jun 2023 11:35:08 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;5 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2305.17493/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>cs.LG</category></item></channel></rss>
