arXiv Computation and Language By Xunlei Chen, Qinghui Gong, Jingkun Xue, Qihe Liu, Shijie Zhou, Fei Ye

Not Every Change Is Necessary: Recoverable Drift in Large Language Model Unlearning

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The paper introduces Propose-Then-Project Unlearning (PTP-U), a method for large language model unlearning that first weakens target knowledge associations and then projects non-target outputs back to the original distribution to recover capabilities. PTP-U aims to satisfy forgetting constraints while preserving fluent generation and performance on non-target tasks. Experiments on three benchmarks show PTP-U achieves a strong forgetting‑retention trade‑off, with 81.22%–91.03% forgetting and an average of 94.20% non‑target utility.

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