arXiv Machine Learning

When Forgotten Facts Return: Relearning-Aware Unlearning of Knowledge Graph Embeddings via Tangent Kernels

The paper introduces Kernel-Anticipated Unlearning (KAU), a method for approximate unlearning of knowledge-graph embeddings that accounts for relearning during continued training. KAU uses the tangent kernel to model how forgotten facts’ scores change, expressing this response in closed form and guiding edits to minimize future leakage. Experiments show KAU reduces leakage by 46‑63% on FB15k-237 and 50‑82% on CoDEx-L compared to the strongest existing unlearner, while preserving higher utility.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

GONE: Structural Knowledge Unlearning via Neighborhood-Expanded Distribution Shaping

The paper introduces GONE, a benchmark for evaluating knowledge unlearning in large language models using structured knowledge graphs, and presents Neighborhood-Expanded Distribution Shaping (NEDS), a framework that leverages graph connectivity to separate forgotten facts from their semantic neighborhood. GONE disentangles direct fact removal, reasoning-based leakage, and catastrophic forgetting, while NEDS achieves high unlearning efficacy and locality on LLaMA-3-8B and Mistral-7B. The dataset is publicly available on Hugging Face.

By Chahana Dahal, Ashutosh Balasubramaniam, Zuobin Xiong
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Graph-Guided Selective Unlearning for Language Models: Controlling Support Routes Beyond Forget Seeds

The paper introduces GRAPHSU, a graph‑guided selective unlearning method for language models that expands deletion beyond explicitly identified forget seeds. By constructing a weighted support‑route graph and propagating deletion pressure, GRAPHSU applies graded forgetting to high‑risk neighboring examples. Experiments on the TOFU and PISTOL benchmarks with GPT‑2 Medium and Llama‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that GRAPHSU achieves the lowest utility‑feasible soft leakage, reducing leakage by up to 49.5 percentage points compared to a seed‑only baseline.

By Waqas Khan, Tabinda Sarwar, Jingyue Cong, Xun Yi, Estrid He
arXiv AI
Sep 10

CUNO: Curriculum and Preference Optimization for Stable Graph Unlearning under Mass Deletion

CUNO is a curriculum‑based graph unlearning framework that progressively removes a designated set of training samples, ordering them by estimated unlearning difficulty across multiple stages. It also introduces a distribution‑level negative preference optimization objective at each stage to steer the model away from its original behavior on the current forget subset while preserving performance on retained data. Experiments show that CUNO mitigates catastrophic unlearning, retaining 74% of original utility at 20% deletion and more than half at 50% deletion, outperforming existing methods.

By Chenhan Zhang, Ali Braytee, Madhushi Bandara, Xin Hao, Paul J. Kennedy, Massimo Piccardi, Raymond Owen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Natively Unlearnable Large Language Models

arXiv:2606. 13873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data sources, but this has proved challenging because the contributions of different sources are entangled within the model.

By Gaurav R. Ghosal, Pratyush Maini, Aditi Raghunathan
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Unmerge: Efficient Machine Unlearning via Task Arithmetic

The paper introduces Unmerge, an efficient machine unlearning algorithm that treats unlearning as the inverse of task arithmetic. By representing the forget component as a low‑rank basis at each layer, Unmerge optimizes three goals—matching the merged vector, suppressing leakage, and bounding correction size—to limit forget leakage and retain damage. Experiments on ResNet‑50, ViT‑S/16, and Llama‑3.2‑3B show significant performance gains over existing methods while maintaining privacy and feature‑distribution fidelity.

By Haoran Tang, Andrew Tan, Rajiv Khanna
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

HERO: Preserving Structure and Semantics in Heterogeneous Continual Graph Learning

HERO is a heterogeneous continual graph learning framework that preserves historical knowledge at both structural and semantic levels while adapting to new tasks. It uses DiSCo to select representative target nodes and reconstruct compact heterogeneous contexts, and applies multi-level knowledge distillation to align task-conditioned predictions with semantic responses. Experiments on four datasets with three HGNN backbones show HERO achieves best or tied-best average performance while maintaining competitive forgetting.

By Guiquan Sun, Xikun Zhang, Jingchao Ni, Dongjin Song
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Forgetting Only What Matters: Layer-Selective Unlearning toward Robust LLMs

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
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Rethinking Generalization in Knowledge Graph Embedding: An Empirical Study and Sparse Peak Regularization

arXiv:2505.23442v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide structured representations of entities and relations, and underpin data management and Web applications such as sear...

By Linyu Li, Zhi Jin, Yuanpeng He, Dongming Jin, Haoran Duan, Zhengwei Tao, Xuan Zhang, Jiandong Li, Huanyao Zhang, Gadeng Luosang, Nyima Tashi