arXiv AI

Can Scientific Claims Be Removed from Large Language Models? A Systematic Evaluation of Claim-Level Unlearning

The paper introduces the task of Scientific Claim Unlearning and presents a new benchmark, SciUnlearn, to evaluate it. It highlights that language models trained on static scientific corpora risk disseminating outdated or retracted claims as scientific knowledge evolves. Current machine unlearning methods fail to effectively remove claim-level knowledge, often only suppressing it superficially, underscoring the need for specialized techniques for structured knowledge removal.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Graph-Guided Selective Unlearning for Language Models: Controlling Support Routes Beyond Forget Seeds

The paper introduces GRAPHSU, a graph‑guided selective unlearning method for language models that expands deletion beyond explicitly identified forget seeds. By constructing a weighted support‑route graph and propagating deletion pressure, GRAPHSU applies graded forgetting to high‑risk neighboring examples. Experiments on the TOFU and PISTOL benchmarks with GPT‑2 Medium and Llama‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that GRAPHSU achieves the lowest utility‑feasible soft leakage, reducing leakage by up to 49.5 percentage points compared to a seed‑only baseline.

By Waqas Khan, Tabinda Sarwar, Jingyue Cong, Xun Yi, Estrid He
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

CALIBURN: Self-Calibrated LLM Unlearning Alignment

CALIBURN is a new approach to large language model (LLM) unlearning that measures a model’s confidence in undesirable knowledge and uses this measure to fine‑tune unlearning gradient updates. By doing so, it offers more precise control over what is forgotten while better preserving the model’s overall utility. Experiments on benchmarks such as MUSE and WMDP show that CALIBURN outperforms existing methods in balancing knowledge removal with utility retention.

By Zhengbang Yang, Yisheng Zhong, Junyuan Hong, Zhuangdi Zhu
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Linguistic Loopholes in LLM Unlearning: From a 174-Language Benchmark to Coverage-Aware Unlearning

The paper introduces the problem of cross‑lingual loopholes in large language model (LLM) unlearning, where forgetting a fact in one language can leave it accessible in others. It presents a new 174‑language benchmark, the Cross‑Lingual Unlearning Tensor, and proposes COVER, a method that selects a subset of source languages to maximize unlearning coverage under a language budget. Experiments show COVER reduces residual knowledge by 7.8–27.3% compared to uniform selection and works on both synthetic and real low‑resource news data.

By Tyler Skow, Shravan Chaudhari, Rama Chellappa, Abhay Yadav
arXiv AI
Oct 12

REDaCT: Collapse-Free Unlearning in Large Reasoning Models

The paper introduces REDaCT, an inference-time unlearning framework for large reasoning models that removes forget-set information from both the reasoning trace and the final answer without causing reasoning collapse. REDaCT uses a binary leak detector to spot sentences that leak forget-set data and an embedding optimization module that injects a corrective embedding at the first detected leak, steering subsequent reasoning toward non-leaking sentences. Experiments demonstrate that REDaCT preserves coherent chain-of-thought reasoning, outperforms existing unlearning methods, and achieves perfect answer forgetting with near-perfect chain-of-thought forgetting.

By Joshua Maccoby, Wendy Hui Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

HyGRAIL: Cost-Aware and Evidence-Grounded Scientific Hypothesis Discovery over Knowledge Graphs

HyGRAIL is a framework for discovering scientific hypotheses in incomplete knowledge graphs by combining a graph neural network (GNN) triage with large language model (LLM) review. The GNN scores candidate hypotheses and routes only ambiguous cases to the LLM, which receives structured evidence from the graph converted into natural language. Experiments on MatKG show HyGRAIL achieves the highest F1 score, improves over baselines, and cuts LLM calls by over 54%.

By Yihang Sun, Zhihan Zhu, Zhiyuan Jiang, Jingyi Ge, Zixuan Li, Jiaxuan You