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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements.
arXiv:2607. 00605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Limited Memory Language Models (LMLMs) externalize factual knowledge to a database to enable deletion-based unlearning without retraining.
arXiv:2608. 20338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly require selective removal of harmful or sensitive knowledge, called unlearning, yet existing methods and benchmarks fail to evaluate this capability completely.
arXiv:2607. 09236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning in LLMs is the targeted removal of specific knowledge while preserving all other capabilities, critical for privacy and safety.
CALIBURN is a new approach to large language model (LLM) unlearning that measures a model’s confidence in undesirable knowledge and uses this measure to fine‑tune unlearning gradient updates. By doing so, it offers more precise control over what is forgotten while better preserving the model’s overall utility. Experiments on benchmarks such as MUSE and WMDP show that CALIBURN outperforms existing methods in balancing knowledge removal with utility retention.
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.
arXiv:2605.24614v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) unlearning has emerged as a crucial post-hoc mechanism for privacy protection and AI safety, yet auditing whether...
arXiv:2510.17021v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) unlearning is a key approach for removing undesired data, knowledge, or behaviors from pretrained models while ret...
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:2606. 06286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can reproduce training data, but existing memorization evaluations mostly measure whether models can be forced to do so, rather than whether they do so under ordinary use.
arXiv:2601. 22601v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) aims to erase knowledge from a global model.