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
Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize and reproduce sensitive, copyrighted, or otherwise undesirable training content, creating privacy, safety, and regulatory concerns. Machine unlearning offers...
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.
By Sahil Kale, Ian Harris
arXiv:2607. 18639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety interventions on dual-use knowledge typically choose between destroying hazardous content (e.
By Seunghyun Lee, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
arXiv:2606. 06320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted knowledge from a trained model while preserving its general capabilities.
By Gizem Y\"uce, Giorgos Nikolaou, Nicolas Flammarion
arXiv:2608.21544v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as tool-augmented agents, where responses can depend on tool calls and external observations r...
By Baicheng Chen, Zheyuan Liu, Jingyu Zhang, Kaize Ding, Ningshan Ma, Yue Huang, Meng Jiang
Safety interventions on dual-use knowledge typically choose between destroying hazardous content (e. g.
arXiv:2508.20443v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive datasets that may include private or copyrighted content. Due to growing privacy and ownership...
By Zhihao Liu, Jian Lou, Yuke Hu, Xiaochen Li, Yitian Chen, Tailun Chen, Zhizhen Qin, Kui Ren, Zhan Qin
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...
By Jaeung Lee, Dohyun Kim, Jaemin Jo
arXiv:2608. 03791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like Large Language Models (LLMs), may memorize sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful knowledge from their pretraining corpora.
By Chunlin Liu, Junnian Chen, Haitong Jiang, Jianyu Zhao, Yingsen Pang, Jingchen Li, Jiabiao He, Youming Lu, Jinhe Bi, Yuntao Du
UNBIND is a code unlearning framework that selectively removes memorized code from large language models at inference time while keeping the model weights unchanged. It constructs separate directional steering for hidden states that correspond to target code, enabling high forgetting rates (97.3–99.1% reduction in target code reproduction) with minimal loss in programming utility. Across multiple baselines, corpora, and evaluation metrics—including F‑BLEU, HumanEval+, and MBPP+—UNBIND consistently achieves the best joint forgetting and utility scores, and it effectively eliminates long exact code spans in repeated extraction tests.
By Zhengyang Shan, Jiayun Xin, Yanjun Lin, Xu Qian, Zhiang Liu, Minghui Xu, Yue Zhang, Qin Hu, Kun Li, Xiuzhen Cheng
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