Hugging Face Trending Papers

DFMU: Data-Frugal Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning is an emerging domain that ensures the safe removal of elements (includes concepts, attributes, entity and class) from the trained model along with least drop in model performance. The domain of machine unlearning brings its own indigenous challenges since the removal of pre-trained elements from model will always degrade the model performance on remaining elements.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

DFMU: Data-Frugal Machine Unlearning

arXiv:2606. 25410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning is an emerging domain that ensures the safe removal of elements (includes concepts, attributes, entity and class) from the trained model along with least drop in model performance.

By Sajith U, Prateek Keserwani
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

CALIBURN: Self-Calibrated LLM Unlearning Alignment

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
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 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 AI
Jul 7

De-attribute to Forget for LLM Unlearning

arXiv:2605. 30919v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns on the use of inappropriate data for training, which has led to a growing interest in LLM unlearning.

By Xinyang Lu, Jiabao Pan, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, See-Kiong Ng, Anthony Kum Hoe Tung, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Data Unlearning via Inverse Distillation

arXiv:2609.36099v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step matching models, including flow and diffusion models, produce high-quality outputs but incur substantial inference costs and may reproduce u...

By Aleksei Leonov, Nikita Kornilov, Zhenhe Zhang, Evgeny Burnaev, Iaroslav Koshelev, Alexander Korotin
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

Why Forget-Only Unlearning Needs Memorization

The paper investigates the feasibility of forget‑only unlearning, where a deletion algorithm can only access the trained model and the examples to forget, without any retained data or additional training information. It demonstrates that the possibility of successful unlearning depends on the learning method, showing that different datasets can yield identical models yet require distinct post‑deletion outputs. The authors establish lower bounds on the accuracy of unlearning relative to retraining and prove that, for certain learners, the algorithm must memorize a substantial portion of the training data—potentially the entire dataset—to handle arbitrary deletion requests, implying that models designed for forget‑only unlearning may need to retain more information than standard training does.

By Luka Radi\'c, Vikrant Singhal, Amartya Sanyal
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Reference-Guided Machine Unlearning

Reference-Guided Machine Unlearning (ReGUn) is a vision unlearning framework that prioritizes distributional indistinguishability over degradation-based heuristics. It uses disjoint held-out data to create a class-conditioned reference distribution for distillation, guiding forget samples toward non-member behavior without explicitly degrading predictions. Experiments across various architectures and datasets show that ReGUn achieves a competitive forgetting–utility trade-off and closely matches retrain-like membership inference behavior.

By Jonas Mirlach, Sonia Laguna, Julia E. Vogt