The paper introduces Update‑Matched Unlearning (UMU), a method that applies the same simulated relearning update to both a defended model and an undefended reference to better preserve plasticity while resisting relearning of deleted knowledge. Experiments on Llama and Qwen models with TOFU and FaithUn datasets show that UMU reduces harmful and benign relearning by 30.4 and 9.9 points on average and increases new‑task accuracy by 3.5 points, supporting the reference‑timing hypothesis. The study demonstrates that robust unlearning should selectively prevent recovery of deleted knowledge without suppressing the model’s ability to learn new tasks.
By Jie Li, Youming Tao, Bowei He, Meng Ding
The paper investigates whether a model that has undergone class unlearning can still recover forgotten classes without access to original data. It introduces a white‑box audit method that generates synthetic probes in representation space, filters them by confidence, and relabels boundary‑adjacent probes as the forgotten class. The authors define a Relearning Score to quantify recovery while preserving retain performance, and demonstrate that several unlearning techniques on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, and TinyImageNet can be fully recovered in a source‑free setting, sometimes even outperforming a retrained reference.
By Zahra Dehghani, Pablo Piantanida, Mohammadhadi Shateri
UpgradeBench is a decision‑centric longitudinal benchmark that evaluates how fine‑tuned language‑model specialists should be handled when new base‑model releases occur. It covers four consecutive Qwen releases, a continuation checkpoint, six tasks, two model sizes, and OLMo checkpoints with known training lineage, and examines whether retraining, adapter transfer, or other recovery strategies improve specialist performance. The benchmark reveals that upgrade gains vary by task and release interval, that direct adapter copying is sensitive to pretraining distance, and that teacher relabeling can recover specialists without new annotations.
"whyItMatters":"The study provides actionable insights into the cost‑effective management of specialist models across model releases, showing how to balance retraining effort with performance gains."
By Ye Chen, Weining Zhang
The paper presents a robust approximate unlearning method for Generalized Learning Vector Quantization (GLVQ) classifiers, enabling the removal of specific data samples from trained models. It evaluates how the size and characteristics of the forget set affect unlearning, proposes an adapted technique to mitigate instabilities, and demonstrates that the method achieves near-zero deviation from a fully retrained model while being up to 10^5 times more efficient on benchmark tabular datasets. The approach is applicable to any GLVQ model without altering its training scheme.
By Sreejita Ghosh, Mohammad Mohammadi
arXiv:2610.31786v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) aims to remove a designated target client's influence from a trained model without the prohibitive cost of retraining from sc...
By Thanh Linh Nguyen, Quoc-Viet Pham
arXiv:2607. 19442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning is commonly evaluated by matching a retrained oracle on trained probes.
By Sen Yang, Yuen-Hei Yeung
arXiv:2609.37076v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models trained on vast corpora inherently risk memorizing harmful content that may later re-emerge in their outputs. To mitigate this is...
By Puning Yang, Qizhou Wang, Junchi Yu, Bo Han, Xiuying Chen
The paper introduces Conflict-Aware Unlearning (CAU), a schema‑aware method designed to reduce forget‑retain interference in tabular data. CAU relaxes preservation constraints on retained rows that conflict most with the forget set, improving alignment with a retraining oracle while preserving predictive utility. Experiments on clinical and non‑medical tabular tasks demonstrate CAU’s effectiveness for both sample‑level and feature‑level unlearning.
By Zijie Liu, Jinhao Duan, Bingqi Shang, Xinming An, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen
The paper investigates what a service must retain to faithfully reproduce a training pipeline after data deletion requests, focusing on a rule where earlier similar records block later ones. It shows that a limit on future deletions precisely determines which records can still be needed for training, enabling an exact repair of training statistics after repeated deletions. The authors also construct finite‑precision features for ridge regression and demonstrate that the required private information can be minimized across a sequence of deletion requests, validating their approach on 1,001 AskUbuntu records.
By Priyank Jayraj, Devanshu sahoo, Uday Mittal
arXiv:2609.26242v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: When a data license expires, deleting stored records does not remove influence encoded in a trained forecaster. Machine unlearning seeks to remove this...
By Junyi Ye
The study audits 16 open RLVR math corpora, totaling 1,673,514 training items, against six benchmarks with 1,949 questions to assess the reliability and data‑loss costs of decontamination policies. Eight policies—based on exact, lexical, and semantic matching—were evaluated using 594 dual‑reviewed training‑benchmark pairs, with calibration and held‑out sets ensuring disjoint benchmark questions and training‑example families. Results show that at a cosine threshold of 0.80, 88% of sampled removals were false, and no semantic threshold in the tested grid met a 90% conservative‑precision target; however, the judge‑adjudicated policy achieved 98.1% resolved precision and 98.2% recall on held‑out corpora, with no confirmed false removals among six sampled removals.
By Esther Xin
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.
By Zizhao Hu, Ameya Godbole, Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei, Mohammad Rostami, Jesse Thomason, Robin Jia