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QUAIL: Quantization Aware Unlearning for Mitigating Misinformation in LLMs

Machine Learning 2026-01-23 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Machine unlearning aims to remove specific knowledge (e.g., copyrighted or private data) from a trained model without full retraining. In practice, models are often quantized (e.g., 4-bit) for deployment, but we find that quantization can catastrophically restore forgotten information [1]. In this paper, we (1) analyze why low-bit quantization undermines unlearning, and (2) propose a quantization-aware unlearning method to mitigate this. We first compute weight-change statistics and bucket overlaps in quantization to show that typical unlearning updates are too small to cross quantization thresholds. Building on this insight, we introduce a logits space hinge loss: for each forget example, we force the output logits of the unlearned model to differ from the original model by at least a margin (half the quantization step). This ensures forgotten examples remain distinguishable even after quantization. We evaluate on language and classification tasks (including a Twitter misinformation dataset) and show our method preserves forgetting under 4-bit quantization, whereas existing methods almost entirely recover the forgotten knowledge.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.15538,
  title  = {QUAIL: Quantization Aware Unlearning for Mitigating Misinformation in LLMs},
  author = {Himanshu Mishra and Kanwal Mehreen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.15538},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:15:03.086Z