arXiv AI By Itai Zehavi, Fanny Jourdan, Ulrich Aivodji

Neuralyzing the Trace: Selective Representation-Level Unlearning with Contrastive Sparse Autoencoders

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The paper introduces SCALPEL, a contrastive sparse autoencoder that selectively learns to unlearn target-specific information from neural network representations. It addresses the energy bias in standard reconstruction-based extractors, which tend to preserve dominant background structure while neglecting low-energy target components. The authors provide theoretical justification that contrastive training enhances target selectivity and demonstrate experimentally that SCALPEL outperforms NMF and standard SAE interventions on the TOFU benchmark, achieving performance comparable to Gradient Difference and RMU methods.

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