arXiv Machine Learning

SAUL: Sharpness-Aware Augmented-Lagrangian Unlearning

arXiv:2608. 16249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a critical trade-off between erasing target knowledge and preserving general utility.

arXiv AI
6d ago

Estimating and Orthogonalizing Unknown Pre-training Gradients for Continual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

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.

By Bing Wang, Changchun Li, Xin-Qiang Cai, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Ximing Li, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Confess What You Know: Forget-Set Misalignment with Model Knowledge in LLM Unlearning

The paper identifies a problem in large language model (LLM) unlearning called forget‑set misalignment, where the set of data to be forgotten does not match what the model has actually memorized. Two failure modes are described: Under Unlearning, where memorized information is omitted from the forget set, and Out‑of‑Knowledge Unlearning, where the algorithm attempts to forget knowledge the model never learned, harming performance. The authors propose CONfs, a data‑blind framework that constructs model‑aligned forget sets by eliciting the model’s memorized knowledge, and demonstrate that it achieves near‑gold standard forgetting while preserving utility better than other data‑blind methods.

By Miso Kim, Georu Lee, Seungwon Jeong, Woojin Lee
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Unlearning Is Not Just Erasing: Temporal Decoupling via Generation Inequality

The paper introduces ADU, a fine‑grained training framework that unlearns sensitive information from large language models by decoupling contextual attention pathways instead of erasing tokens. ADU exploits the distinction between local and global attention heads to identify and suppress attention paths that retrieve persistent sensitive anchors, while preserving local‑attention structure and overall language modeling performance. Evaluation on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks shows ADU achieves superior forget quality (0.93 on TOFU) and retains 92.9% of model utility compared to 81.9% for existing baselines, with fewer side effects in benign contexts.

By Xunlei Chen, Qirui Ye, Yuang Li, Yi Gong, Zhaokun Wang, Wenyi Li, Shiyao Guo, Jinyu Guo
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

Inference-Time Machine Unlearning via Gated Activation Redirection

arXiv:2605. 12765v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models memorize vast amounts of training data, raising concerns regarding privacy, copyright infringement, and safety.

By Vin\'icius Conte Turani, Ot\'avio Parraga, Jo\~ao Vitor Boer Abitante, Kristen K. Arguello, Joana Pasquali, Ramiro N. Barros, Flavio du Pin Calmon, Christian Mattjie, Rodrigo C. Barros, Lucas S. Kupssinsk\"u