The paper introduces Continual Orthogonal Projection (COP), a gradient‑projection method that limits each unlearning update to the orthogonal complement of previously cached activation subspaces, thereby preventing interference between successive deletions. COP requires only a low‑rank basis per layer, avoiding the need for past gradients or previous forget sets, and can be applied to any differentiable‑loss unlearning method without altering its objective. Experiments on TOFU and RWKU benchmarks demonstrate that COP maintains model utility across sequential unlearning requests while preserving forgetting effectiveness and preventing collapse of standard objectives.
arXiv:2606. 03808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose PURGE, a machine unlearning algorithm built on a simple but an under-exploited observation: continual learning (CL) and machine unlearning (MU) which are fundamentally dual problems.
arXiv:2606. 29832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of specific data from trained models to safeguard privacy.
Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of specific data from trained models to safeguard privacy. However, this presents a significant challenge in the context of continual learning (CL), where models update sequentially on dynamic datasets.
arXiv:2603. 11201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The world is inherently dynamic, and continual learning aims to enable models to adapt to ever-evolving data streams.
arXiv:2505. 12239v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Continual Learning (CL), using a Pre-Trained Model (PTM) as the feature extractor has become a popular practice.
The paper introduces EoupCT, a framework that estimates and orthogonalizes unknown pre‑training gradients to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during continual fine‑tuning of large language models. It generates pseudo data most susceptible to forgetting using a learnable soft prompt with Gumbel‑Softmax, then jointly optimizes model parameters and the prompt via a first‑order Pareto optimizer to enforce orthogonality between new task updates and the estimated gradients. Experiments on multiple LLMs show that EoupCT preserves both task‑specific performance and the models’ inherent general‑purpose knowledge.
arXiv:2512. 02657v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world deployment of text-to-image diffusion models requires continual concept removal as new privacy, copyright, or safety obligations arise over time.
arXiv:2508.20443v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive datasets that may include private or copyrighted content. Due to growing privacy and ownership...
We argue that forgetting is not confined to continual learning but is a general optimization phenomenon: during standard training, dominant mini-batch gradients suppress rare but useful update directions, causing short-term forgetting at every step. When such knowledge is never revisited, these losses compound into long-term forgetting-the classical failure mode of continual learning.
arXiv:2609.05966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing unlearning approaches typically rely on post hoc weight adaptation or distillation, leading to duplicated memory costs, degraded generalizatio...
The paper introduces Forgetting Only What Matters via Unlearning Layers (FOM-UL), a layer‑selective unlearning framework for large language models. FOM-UL uses a forget‑to‑retain significance score to identify transformer layers that strongly influence the forget set while being insensitive to the retain set, allowing targeted updates that preserve most of the model. Experiments on TOFU, KnowUnDo, and MUSE-style benchmarks show that FOM-UL reduces residual memorization and maintains utility better than several baselines, even after 8‑bit and 4‑bit post‑training quantization, and it also limits recovery of forgotten content in adversarial prompt tests.
Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize and reproduce sensitive, copyrighted, or otherwise undesirable training content, creating privacy, safety, and regulatory concerns. Machine unlearning offers...