arXiv:2610.01969v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Concept erasure aims to remove a target concept, such as a copyrighted style, a recognizable character, or unsafe content, from a pretrained text-to-im...
By Yongliang Wu, Haori Lu, Yulun Wu, Jinqi Luo, Xingyu Zhu, Yaoyao Liu
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.
By Ravi Ranjan, Olivera Kotevska, Agoritsa Polyzou
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: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
arXiv:2607. 23492v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept erasure techniques (CETs) edit text-to-image diffusion models to erase undesired targets such as NSFW content or copyrighted styles, while preserving model utility on benign concepts.
By Shaswati Saha, Rajasekhar Anguluri, Manas Gaur
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.
By Yingdan Shi, Xiang Xu, Kaize Ding, Alfred O. Hero, Ren Wang
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:2607. 06432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept unlearning in text-to-image diffusion models is critical for safe and practical deployment: with rising privacy concerns, copyright disputes, trademark constraints, and safety regulations, deployed systems must be able to suppress unwanted concepts after training.
By Naveen George, Naoki Murata, Yuhta Takida, Konda Reddy Mopuri, Yuki Mitsufuji
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.
By Vedant Jawandhia, Daksh Ahuja, Ghufran Alam Siddiqui, Prashant Trivedi, Yash Sinha, Pratik Narang
Training-free concept erasure is an attractive mechanism for controlling text-to-image diffusion models, but precise erasure often comes at the cost of damaging semantically related non-target concepts. Existing value-space methods remove the component of each cross-attention value along the target concept direction, implicitly treating target identity and shared visual structure as the same signal.
arXiv:2604. 02183v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal recommendation systems (MRS) jointly model user-item interaction graphs and rich item content, but this tight coupling makes user data difficult to remove once learned.
By Zhanting Zhou, KaHou Tam, Ziqiang Zheng, Zeyu Ma, Yang Yang
Reference-Guided Machine Unlearning (ReGUn) is a vision unlearning framework that prioritizes distributional indistinguishability over degradation-based heuristics. It uses disjoint held-out data to create a class-conditioned reference distribution for distillation, guiding forget samples toward non-member behavior without explicitly degrading predictions. Experiments across various architectures and datasets show that ReGUn achieves a competitive forgetting–utility trade-off and closely matches retrain-like membership inference behavior.
By Jonas Mirlach, Sonia Laguna, Julia E. Vogt