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