arXiv Machine Learning

Correlation-Guided Fast Machine Unlearning via Hessian Analysis

The paper presents a fast machine unlearning method that uses Hessian analysis to identify correlated training data and applies a closed‑form update rule. This approach achieves an 82× speedup over traditional influence‑function unlearning while maintaining or slightly improving model accuracy. Experiments on seven dataset‑architecture pairs, including CIFAR‑100 with ResNet‑50, show strong forgetting performance and low vulnerability to membership inference attacks.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

SAEs Can Improve Unlearning: Dynamic Sparse Autoencoder Guardrails for Precision Unlearning in LLMs

The paper introduces Dynamic DAE Guardrails (DSG), a method that uses Dynamic Sparse Autoencoders to perform precision unlearning in large language models. DSG leverages principled feature selection and a dynamic classifier to target activation-based unlearning, outperforming existing gradient‑based methods in terms of computational efficiency, stability, sequential unlearning, resistance to relearning attacks, data efficiency, and interpretability.

By Aashiq Muhamed, Jacopo Bonato, Mona Diab, Virginia Smith
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Confess What You Know: Forget-Set Misalignment with Model Knowledge in LLM Unlearning

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Causal Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks

arXiv:2602. 02819v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) aim to distinguish training points (members) from unseen data (non-members), and are widely used to quantify memorization and assess privacy risks.

By Mathieu Even, Cl\'ement Berenfeld, Linus Bleistein, Tudor Cebere, Julie Josse, Aur\'elien Bellet