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Related papers: Large Scale Knowledge Washing

200 papers

Large Language Models' knowledge of how to perform cyber-security attacks, create bioweapons, and manipulate humans poses risks of misuse. Previous work has proposed methods to unlearn this knowledge. Historically, it has been unclear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Aghyad Deeb , Fabien Roger

We explore machine unlearning (MU) in the domain of large language models (LLMs), referred to as LLM unlearning. This initiative aims to eliminate undesirable data influence (e.g., sensitive or illegal information) and the associated model…

Large language models inevitably retain sensitive information, defined as inputs that may induce harmful generations, due to training on massive web corpora, raising concerns for privacy and safety. Existing machine unlearning methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yujie Lin , Chengyi Yang , Zhishang Xiang , Yiping Song , Jinsong Su

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable generative capabilities but raise ethical and security concerns by memorizing sensitive data, reinforcing biases, and producing harmful content. These risks have spurred interest in LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Changsheng Wang , Yihua Zhang , Dennis Wei , Jinghan Jia , Pin-Yu Chen , Sijia Liu

Unlearning seeks to remove specific knowledge from large language models (LLMs), but its effectiveness remains contested. On one side, "forgotten" knowledge can often be recovered through interventions such as light fine-tuning; on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Qingjie Zhang , Haoting Qian , Zhicong Huang , Cheng Hong , Minlie Huang , Ke Xu , Chao Zhang , Han Qiu

Large language model unlearning has garnered increasing attention due to its potential to address security and privacy concerns, leading to extensive research in the field. However, much of this research has concentrated on instance-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Weitao Ma , Xiaocheng Feng , Weihong Zhong , Lei Huang , Yangfan Ye , Xiachong Feng , Bing Qin

This study investigates the machine unlearning techniques within the context of large language models (LLMs), referred to as \textit{LLM unlearning}. LLM unlearning offers a principled approach to removing the influence of undesirable data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiahui Geng , Qing Li , Herbert Woisetschlaeger , Zongxiong Chen , Fengyu Cai , Yuxia Wang , Preslav Nakov , Hans-Arno Jacobsen , Fakhri Karray

Knowledge erasure in large language models (LLMs) is important for ensuring compliance with data and AI regulations, safeguarding user privacy, mitigating bias, and misinformation. Existing unlearning methods aim to make the process of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Yash Sinha , Manit Baser , Murari Mandal , Dinil Mon Divakaran , Mohan Kankanhalli

Current unlearning methods for large language models usually rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. However, this paradigm disrupts the subsequent tokens prediction, degrading model performance and linguistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Haoming Xu , Ningyuan Zhao , Liming Yang , Sendong Zhao , Shumin Deng , Mengru Wang , Bryan Hooi , Nay Oo , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements, drawing significant attention from the research community. Their capabilities are largely attributed to large-scale architectures, which require extensive…

Machine unlearning aims to remove unwanted information from a model, but many methods are inefficient for LLMs with large numbers of parameters or fail to fully remove the intended information without degrading performance on knowledge that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Shariqah Hossain , Lalana Kagal

Knowledge editing and machine unlearning are two popular approaches for large language models (LLMs) to stay up-to-date. However, the knowledge updating mechanism of LLMs remains largely unexplored due to insufficient, isolated, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Yinyi Luo , Zhexian Zhou , Hao Chen , Kai Qiu , Marios Savvides , Sharon Li , Jindong Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and memorization capabilities via pretraining on massive textual corpora. However, this poses risk of privacy and copyright violations, highlighting the need for efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Sungmin Cha , Sungjun Cho , Dasol Hwang , Moontae Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be a great success in a wide range of applications ranging from regular NLP-based use cases to AI agents. LLMs have been trained on a vast corpus of texts from various sources; despite the best…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Abhinav Joshi , Shaswati Saha , Divyaksh Shukla , Sriram Vema , Harsh Jhamtani , Manas Gaur , Ashutosh Modi

In this paper, we investigate knowledge forgetting in large language models with a focus on its generalisation, ensuring that models forget not only specific training samples but also related implicit knowledge. To this end, we begin by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Huazheng Wang , Yongcheng Jing , Haifeng Sun , Yingjie Wang , Jingyu Wang , Jianxin Liao , Dacheng Tao

Machine unlearning aims to remove sensitive or undesired data from large language models. However, recent studies suggest that unlearning is often shallow, claiming that removed knowledge can easily be recovered. In this work, we critically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Zhili Feng , Yixuan Even Xu , Alexander Robey , Robert Kirk , Xander Davies , Yarin Gal , Avi Schwarzschild , J. Zico Kolter

Exact unlearning was first introduced as a privacy mechanism that allowed a user to retract their data from machine learning models on request. Shortly after, inexact schemes were proposed to mitigate the impractical costs associated with…

Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) aims to remove specified data, but its efficacy is typically assessed with task-level metrics like accuracy and perplexity. We show that these metrics can be misleading, as models can appear to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xiaoyu Xu , Xiang Yue , Yang Liu , Qingqing Ye , Huadi Zheng , Peizhao Hu , Minxin Du , Haibo Hu

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a notable field, attracting significant attention for its ability to automatically generate intelligent contents for various application domains. However, LLMs still suffer from…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Kongyang Chen , Zixin Wang , Bing Mi , Waixi Liu , Shaowei Wang , Xiaojun Ren , Jiaxing Shen

Large language Model (LLM) unlearning, i.e., selectively removing information from LLMs, is vital for responsible model deployment. Differently, LLM knowledge editing aims to modify LLM knowledge instead of removing it. Though editing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zexi Li , Xiangzhu Wang , William F. Shen , Meghdad Kurmanji , Xinchi Qiu , Dongqi Cai , Chao Wu , Nicholas D. Lane