arXiv:2611.06681v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Machine unlearning is commonly evaluated with standard post-deletion metrics that compare an unlearned model to one retrained on the remaining data. Su...
By Polina Dolgova, Amartya Sanyal, Sebastian U. Stich
arXiv:2604. 26866v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) acquire most of their factual knowledge during the pre-training stage, through next token prediction.
By Dimitris Dimakopoulos, Shay B. Cohen, Ioannis Konstas
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 how machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) can unintentionally erase related knowledge, even in distant domains. By analyzing the propagation of unlearning effects before any model updates, the authors discover a consistent decay pattern where collateral damage is strongest near the targeted forget set and diminishes with semantic distance but never fully disappears at domain boundaries. They propose a pre-unlearning prediction task—forget-set auditing—to identify potential collateral damage early, finding that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set are the most predictive signals. This approach offers an early warning system for risky unlearning runs and guides the design of more reliable unlearning procedures.
By Bo Su, Ankit Shah, Thai Le
arXiv:2607. 25546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a model that is already trained, which features does it rely on causally versus spuriously?
By Athanasios Vlontzos, Giorgos Papanastasiou, Bernhard Kainz, Sotirios Tsaftaris
The paper audits whether synthetic distractors in RLVR corpora act as shortcuts for learning policies. A classifier using only surface statistics barely outperforms chance, and manual inspection reveals that code distractors are almost identical to correct answers. Experiments with a paraphrase‑matched control show no exploitation advantage for the unmodified data, indicating that the detectable artifact was not used by the policy.
By Esther Xin