English

From Domains to Instances: Dual-Granularity Data Synthesis for LLM Unlearning

Computation and Language 2026-04-21 v2 Artificial Intelligence Cryptography and Security Machine Learning

Abstract

Although machine unlearning is essential for removing private, harmful, or copyrighted content from LLMs, current benchmarks often fail to faithfully represent the true ``forgetting scope'' learned by the model. We formalize two distinct unlearning granularities, domain-level and instance-level, and propose \BiForget, an automated framework for synthesizing high-quality forget sets. Unlike prior work relying on \emph{external} generators, \BiForget exploits the target model per se to elicit data that matches its internal knowledge distribution through seed-guided and adversarial prompting. Our experiments across diverse benchmarks show that it achieves a superior balance of relevance, diversity, and efficiency. Quantitatively, in the Harry Potter domain, it improves relevance by 20{\sim}20 and diversity by {\sim}0.05 while \emph{halving} the total data size compared to SOTAs. Ultimately, it facilitates more robust forgetting and better utility preservation, providing a more rigorous foundation for evaluating LLM unlearning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.04278,
  title  = {From Domains to Instances: Dual-Granularity Data Synthesis for LLM Unlearning},
  author = {Xiaoyu Xu and Minxin Du and Zitong Li and Zi Liang and Zhibiao Guo and Shiyu Zhang and Peizhao Hu and Qingqing Ye and Haibo Hu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.04278},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

ACL 2026 (Findings), accepted to appear