Nullify is a training‑free method for unlearning sensitive information from large language models by steering activations during inference. It uses steering vectors to redirect privacy‑related activations away from memorized answers while enforcing a null‑space constraint that preserves activations for retained queries, thereby maintaining model utility. Experiments on TOFU and MUSE demonstrate that Nullify matches or outperforms existing baselines in forget quality while keeping utility nearly intact, all without any weight updates.
By Wei Zhai, Xiang Liu, Qiang Huang, Rui Qian, Lemao Liu, Ziwei Li, Ziqi Wang, Zhitao Huang, Dejing Dou
Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) often assumes that a pre-defined forget set matches what the model has memorized, but this frequently breaks in realistic privacy settings where the...
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.
By Amit Peleg, Naman Deep Singh, Naama Pearl, Bibhabasu Mohapatra, Matthias Hein
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
The paper identifies a problem in large language model (LLM) unlearning called forget‑set misalignment, where the set of data to be forgotten does not match what the model has actually memorized. Two failure modes are described: Under Unlearning, where memorized information is omitted from the forget set, and Out‑of‑Knowledge Unlearning, where the algorithm attempts to forget knowledge the model never learned, harming performance. The authors propose CONfs, a data‑blind framework that constructs model‑aligned forget sets by eliciting the model’s memorized knowledge, and demonstrate that it achieves near‑gold standard forgetting while preserving utility better than other data‑blind methods.
By Miso Kim, Georu Lee, Seungwon Jeong, Woojin Lee
arXiv:2605. 18879v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models inevitably retain sensitive information, defined as inputs that may induce harmful generations, due to training on massive web corpora, raising concerns for privacy and safety.
By Yujie Lin, Chengyi Yang, Zhishang Xiang, Yiping Song, Jinsong Su
Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize and reproduce sensitive, copyrighted, or otherwise undesirable training content, creating privacy, safety, and regulatory concerns. Machine unlearning offers...
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:2512. 05254v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As concerns around data privacy in machine learning grow, the ability to unlearn, or remove, specific data points from trained models becomes increasingly important.
By Anat Kleiman, Robert Fisher, Ben Deaner, Udi Wieder
The paper introduces ADU, a fine‑grained training framework that unlearns sensitive information from large language models by decoupling contextual attention pathways instead of erasing tokens. ADU exploits the distinction between local and global attention heads to identify and suppress attention paths that retrieve persistent sensitive anchors, while preserving local‑attention structure and overall language modeling performance. Evaluation on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks shows ADU achieves superior forget quality (0.93 on TOFU) and retains 92.9% of model utility compared to 81.9% for existing baselines, with fewer side effects in benign contexts.
By Xunlei Chen, Qirui Ye, Yuang Li, Yi Gong, Zhaokun Wang, Wenyi Li, Shiyao Guo, Jinyu Guo
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
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.
By Zhengbang Yang, Yisheng Zhong, Junyuan Hong, Zhuangdi Zhu