The Forgetting-Retention Dilemma: Certified Unlearning Theory in Continual Learning
arXiv:2606. 29832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of specific data from trained models to safeguard privacy.
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.
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: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:2511. 08226v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In order to achieve Continual Learning (CL), the problem of catastrophic forgetting, one that has plagued neural networks since their inception, must be overcome.
Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize and reproduce sensitive, copyrighted, or otherwise undesirable training content, creating privacy, safety, and regulatory concerns. Machine unlearning offers...
arXiv:2606. 11272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative and privacy-preserving model training across distributed clients, but most existing FL systems implicitly assume data stationarity.
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.
arXiv:2507. 04771v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Privacy protection laws, such as the GDPR, grant individuals the right to request the forgetting of their personal data not only from databases but also from machine learning (ML) models trained on them.
arXiv:2512. 18295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual graph learning (CGL) aims to enable graph neural networks to incrementally learn from a stream of graph structured data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge.
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.
The paper investigates continual machine unlearning, where models must forget data over time. It identifies a fundamental issue called plasticity collapse, where successive unlearning requests cause geometric constraints that saturate parameter space, leading to two failure modes: forward failure (reduced forgetting quality) and backward failure (re‑memorization). Experiments across architectures and datasets confirm that plasticity collapse is a pervasive problem in continual unlearning.
arXiv:2609.27355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unlearning ensures LLM compliance by removing the influence of private or copyrighted training data. However, since LLM models typically undergo post...