arXiv Machine Learning

Unforgettable Generalization in Language Models

arXiv:2409. 02228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change?

arXiv AI
3d ago

Mitigating Memorization In Language Models

The paper explores ways to reduce the memorization of training data in language models, testing three regularizer-based, three finetuning-based, and eleven machine unlearning methods—five of which are newly introduced. It introduces TinyMem, a lightweight suite of small models for rapid testing of these mitigation techniques, and shows that unlearning methods, particularly BalancedSubnet, outperform others in removing memorized content while maintaining task performance. The study also finds that regularizer-based approaches are slow and ineffective, while finetuning methods are costly, especially when high accuracy is required.

By Mansi Sakarvadia, Aswathy Ajith, Arham Khan, Nathaniel Hudson, Caleb Geniesse, Kyle Chard, Yaoqing Yang, Ian Foster, Michael W. Mahoney
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Learning What Not to Forget: Long-Horizon Agent Memory from a Few Kilobytes of Learning

The paper introduces LRE (Learned Relevance Eviction), a lightweight, CPU‑only, language‑model‑free scorer that learns which parts of an agent’s interaction history are task‑critical and preserves them verbatim. In experiments, LRE matches or surpasses baseline eviction policies on accuracy‑cost trade‑offs, recovers 93% of full‑history accuracy, reduces worst‑case prompt size by 52%, and outperforms dense and token‑pruning encoders in conversational memory while being 295–1569× smaller. The method also achieves superior budgeted answer quality on LoCoMo reading and can be trained annotation‑free, recovering 95% of supervised scorer performance.

By Nusrat Jahan Lia, Aritra Mazumder
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

Forgetting is Everywhere

arXiv:2511. 04666v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A fundamental challenge in developing general learning algorithms is their tendency to forget past knowledge as they adapt to new data.

By Ben Sanati, Thomas L. Lee, Trevor McInroe, Aidan Scannell, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, David Abel, Amos Storkey
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

LLMs learn different forms of metacognition when trained to predict their own accuracy

The study trains ten open‑weight large language models (LLMs) to predict their own accuracy on factual multiple‑choice questions before answering. Results show that the models’ confidence signals split into two distinct patterns: early in training, confidence aligns with output consistency (how concentrated the answer distribution is), while later, it aligns with true accuracy but only on data similar to the training set. This indicates that calibration training may not universally teach LLMs to detect their own errors.

By Nicolas Yax, Stefano Palminteri, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer