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
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:2607. 09236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning in LLMs is the targeted removal of specific knowledge while preserving all other capabilities, critical for privacy and safety.
By Amit Peleg, Naman Deep Singh, Naama Pearl, Bibhabasu Mohapatra, Matthias Hein
arXiv:2511. 20196v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can inadvertently memorize privacy-sensitive information during training.
By Zhen Zeng, Leijiang Gu, Zhangling Duan, Feng Li, Cees G. M. Snoek, Meng Wang, Zenglin Shi
arXiv:2606. 02119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific forget training data due to privacy, copyright or bias concerns while maintaining the model performance on the remaining retain data.
By Jiangwei Chen, Xinyuan Niu, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Zhengyuan Liu, Nancy F. Chen, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
arXiv:2606. 06320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted knowledge from a trained model while preserving its general capabilities.
By Gizem Y\"uce, Giorgos Nikolaou, Nicolas Flammarion
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.
By Josep Domingo-Ferrer, Najeeb Jebreel, David S\'anchez
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:2605. 30919v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns on the use of inappropriate data for training, which has led to a growing interest in LLM unlearning.
By Xinyang Lu, Jiabao Pan, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, See-Kiong Ng, Anthony Kum Hoe Tung, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
arXiv:2606. 16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements.
By Dayong Ye, Tianqing Zhu, Ruiding Huang, Xinbo Fu, Jiayang Li, Bo Liu, Huan Huo, Wanlei Zhou
arXiv:2608.29943v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can memorize sensitive information, raising serious privacy concerns. Machine unlearning offers a potential solution to re...
By Shicheng Hu, Runzhi Tian, Ziqiao Wang, Yongyi Mao
arXiv:2605. 07482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to selectively remove memorized content such as private data, copyrighted text, or hazardous knowledge, without costly full retraining.
By Zizhao Hu, Ameya Godbole, Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei, Mohammad Rostami, Jesse Thomason, Robin Jia