Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge.
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:2607. 05898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating whether unlearning algorithms truly remove training data influence remains an open challenge.
By Sahasrajit Sarmasarkar, Anastasia Koloskova, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv:2606. 16952v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets.
By Kareem Amin, Rudrajit Das, Alessandro Epasto, Adel Javanmard, Dennis Kraft, M\'onica Ribero, Sergei Vassilvitskii
arXiv:2606. 14518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The removal of learned data from Machine Learning models through Machine Unlearning (MU) has been widely studied; however, there has yet to be an agreed-upon scheme for auditing MU.
By Liou Tang, James Joshi, Ashish Kundu
arXiv:2606. 16952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets.
By Kareem Amin, Rudrajit Das, Alessandro Epasto, Adel Javanmard, Dennis Kraft, M\'onica Ribero, Sergei Vassilvitskii
arXiv:2507. 04219v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current unlearning methods for LLMs optimize on the private information they seek to remove by incorporating it into their fine-tuning data.
By Yan Scholten, Sophie Xhonneux, Leo Schwinn, Stephan G\"unnemann
arXiv:2506. 14003v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine unlearning (MU) for large language models (LLMs), commonly referred to as LLM unlearning, seeks to remove specific undesirable data or knowledge from a trained model, while maintaining its performance on standard tasks.
By Yiwei Chen, Soumyadeep Pal, Yimeng Zhang, Qing Qu, Sijia Liu
The paper investigates the privacy risks inherent in auditing machine unlearning (MU) when the audit relies only on querying the model for behavioral signals. It shows that such generic audit schemes inevitably leak information about the retained data set, providing a geometric transfer theorem that bounds the distinguishability of retained set membership based on audit accuracy. The study also analyzes how the unlearned set, target sample, and query protocol influence the privacy‑audit transfer coefficient, with empirical evidence from both convex and non‑convex models supporting the theoretical findings.
By Liou Tang, James Joshi, Ashish Kundu
The paper investigates how machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) can unintentionally erase related knowledge, even in distant domains. By analyzing the propagation of unlearning effects before any model updates, the authors discover a consistent decay pattern where collateral damage is strongest near the targeted forget set and diminishes with semantic distance but never fully disappears at domain boundaries. They propose a pre-unlearning prediction task—forget-set auditing—to identify potential collateral damage early, finding that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set are the most predictive signals. This approach offers an early warning system for risky unlearning runs and guides the design of more reliable unlearning procedures.
By Bo Su, Ankit Shah, Thai Le
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
arXiv:2606. 10481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) can exhibit problematic memorization of individual training examples.
By Nicole Mitchell, Galen Andrew, Arun Ganesh, Brendan McMahan, Peter Kairouz