arXiv AI

Between Suppression and Collapse: Evaluating Narrative Unlearning with LENS

arXiv:2607. 22657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can reproduce disinformation-aligned narrative frames as plausible explanations, raising the question of whether existing machine-unlearning algorithms can suppress this behavior.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The paper presents a detailed examination of narrative elements—agency, setting, and events—within the Dolma web-scale pretraining corpus. Using a framework of 11 interpretable dimensions, the authors hand‑annotated 400 passages, expanded this to a 25,000‑passage LLM‑labeled dataset, and trained NarraBERT models to predict narrative features across 13 million passages, producing the NarraDolma dataset. The study reveals that narrative structure is measurable at scale and that narrative qualities vary unevenly across different data sources, topics, and formats, highlighting gaps in current data curation practices.

By Teagan Johnson, Elliott Ash, Andrew Piper, Maria Antoniak
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Summarization Bias: The Directional Collapse of Objective Projection into Told-Mode Labels in Large Language Models --- A Conceptual Framework and Registered Test Protocol

The paper introduces the concept of summarization bias in large language models (LLMs), describing a systematic tendency for LLMs to represent narrative meaning as an abstract summary label rather than the reconstructable inferential structure that produces it. It frames this bias within the Bulut Doctrine’s told‑shown axis, arguing that LLMs fail in a specific direction: they default to told‑mode explicitness in generative tasks and reward told‑mode explicitness while under‑detecting shown‑mode suppression in evaluative tasks. The authors outline two regimes of bias, present preliminary evidence, and pre‑register a test protocol to validate or abandon the construct.

By Levent Bulut
arXiv AI
3d ago

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