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In this work, we demonstrate that certain machine unlearning methods may fail under straightforward prompt attacks. We systematically evaluate eight unlearning techniques across three model families using output-based, logit-based, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Yeonwoo Jang , Shariqah Hossain , Ashwin Sreevatsa , Diogo Cruz

Large Language Models are typically trained on datasets collected from the web, which may inadvertently contain harmful or sensitive personal information. To address growing privacy concerns, unlearning methods have been proposed to remove…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Xiaoyu Wu , Yifei Pang , Terrance Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Deep machine unlearning is the problem of `removing' from a trained neural network a subset of its training set. This problem is very timely and has many applications, including the key tasks of removing biases (RB), resolving confusion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Meghdad Kurmanji , Peter Triantafillou , Jamie Hayes , Eleni Triantafillou

Unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to enhance safety, mitigate biases, and comply with legal mandates, such as the right to be forgotten. However, existing unlearning methods are brittle: minor query modifications, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Raj Sanjay Shah , Jing Huang , Keerthiram Murugesan , Nathalie Baracaldo , Diyi Yang

Machine unlearning (MU) is gaining increasing attention due to the need to remove or modify predictions made by machine learning (ML) models. While training models have become more efficient and accurate, the importance of unlearning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Thanveer Shaik , Xiaohui Tao , Haoran Xie , Lin Li , Xiaofeng Zhu , Qing Li

Machine unlearning -- efficiently removing the effect of a small "forget set" of training data on a pre-trained machine learning model -- has recently attracted significant research interest. Despite this interest, however, recent work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Kristian Georgiev , Roy Rinberg , Sung Min Park , Shivam Garg , Andrew Ilyas , Aleksander Madry , Seth Neel

Masked language modeling (MLM) plays a key role in pretraining large language models. But the MLM objective is often dominated by high-frequency words that are sub-optimal for learning factual knowledge. In this work, we propose an approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-05 Nafis Sadeq , Byungkyu Kang , Prarit Lamba , Julian McAuley

Methods for knowledge editing and unlearning in large language models seek to edit or remove undesirable knowledge or capabilities without compromising general language modeling performance. This work investigates how mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Phillip Guo , Aaquib Syed , Abhay Sheshadri , Aidan Ewart , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various domains and tasks, concerns about their safety are becoming increasingly severe. In particular, since models may store unsafe knowledge internally,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Chengcan Wu , Zeming Wei , Huanran Chen , Yinpeng Dong , Meng Sun

Machine Unlearning (MU) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to remove unsafe or outdated information. However, existing work assumes that all facts are equally forgettable and largely ignores whether the forgotten knowledge originates from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Borisiuk Anna , Andrey Savchenko , Alexander Panchenko , Elena Tutubalina

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer extensive knowledge across various domains, but they may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, such as personal information in the medical and financial sectors. Machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 YuXuan Wu , Bonaventure F. P. Dossou , Dianbo Liu

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

Machine unlearning has become a promising solution for fulfilling the "right to be forgotten", under which individuals can request the deletion of their data from machine learning models. However, existing studies of machine unlearning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Hongsheng Hu , Shuo Wang , Tian Dong , Minhui Xue

While numerous machine unlearning (MU) methods have recently been developed with promising results in erasing the influence of forgotten data, classes, or concepts, they are also highly vulnerable-for example, simple fine-tuning can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yichen Gao , Altay Unal , Akshay Rangamani , Zhihui Zhu

The imperative to eliminate undesirable data memorization underscores the significance of machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs). Recent research has introduced a series of promising unlearning methods, notably boosting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Puning Yang , Jianing Zhu , Tongliang Liu , Masashi Sugiyama

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 remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, their tendency to memorize training data raises concerns regarding privacy, copyright compliance, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Arjun Dosajh , Mihika Sanghi

Machine unlearning is a promising approach to mitigate undesirable memorization of training data in ML models. However, in this work we show that existing approaches for unlearning in LLMs are surprisingly susceptible to a simple set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Shengyuan Hu , Yiwei Fu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Virginia Smith

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are widely adopted for their strong multimodal capabilities, yet they raise serious concerns such as privacy leakage and harmful content generation. Machine unlearning has emerged as a promising solution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yejin Kim , Dongjun Hwang , Sungmin Cha , Junsuk Choe

Machine learning (ML) approaches to data analysis are now widely adopted in many fields including epidemiology and medicine. To apply these approaches, confounds must first be removed as is commonly done by featurewise removal of their…