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Related papers: Distillation Robustifies Unlearning

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On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guobin Shen , Xiang Cheng , Chenxiao Zhao , Lei Huang , Jindong Li , Dongcheng Zhao , Xing Yu

Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Cheng-Yu Hsieh , Chun-Liang Li , Chih-Kuan Yeh , Hootan Nakhost , Yasuhisa Fujii , Alexander Ratner , Ranjay Krishna , Chen-Yu Lee , Tomas Pfister

Recent data-privacy laws have sparked interest in machine unlearning, which involves removing the effect of specific training samples from a learnt model as if they were never present in the original training dataset. The challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Tuan Hoang , Santu Rana , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) show that extending the length of reasoning chains significantly improves performance on complex tasks. While revealing these reasoning traces helps users better follow, verify, and learn from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jiayu Ding , Lei Cui , Li Dong , Nanning Zheng , Furu Wei

Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly vulnerable to input perturbations, as even a small prompt change may result in a substantially different output. Existing methods to enhance LLM robustness are primarily focused on perturbed data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Aryan Agrawal , Lisa Alazraki , Shahin Honarvar , Marek Rei

We present DistillFlow, a knowledge distillation approach to learning optical flow. DistillFlow trains multiple teacher models and a student model, where challenging transformations are applied to the input of the student model to generate…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Pengpeng Liu , Michael R. Lyu , Irwin King , Jia Xu

Knowledge distillation is a key technique for transferring the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Existing distillation approaches often overlook two critical factors: the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jincheng Cao , Fanzhi Zeng , Leqi Liu , Aryan Mokhtari

Structured prediction models aim at solving a type of problem where the output is a complex structure, rather than a single variable. Performing knowledge distillation for such models is not trivial due to their exponentially large output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-10 Wenye Lin , Yangming Li , Lemao Liu , Shuming Shi , Hai-tao Zheng

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to selectively remove memorized content such as private data, copyrighted text, or hazardous knowledge, without costly full retraining. Most existing methods require a retain set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zizhao Hu , Ameya Godbole , Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei , Mohammad Rostami , Jesse Thomason , Robin Jia

Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize sensitive information, raising concerns about potential misuse. LLM Unlearning, a post-hoc approach to remove this information from trained LLMs, offers a promising solution to mitigate these risks.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Tianle Gu , Kexin Huang , Ruilin Luo , Yuanqi Yao , Yujiu Yang , Yan Teng , Yingchun Wang

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies have been shown to be deceived by perturbations (e.g., random noise or intensional adversarial attacks) on state observations that appear at test time but are unknown during training. To increase…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Xinghua Qu , Yew-Soon Ong , Abhishek Gupta , Zhu Sun

Continual learning, involving sequential training on diverse tasks, often faces catastrophic forgetting. While knowledge distillation-based approaches exhibit notable success in preventing forgetting, we pinpoint a limitation in their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Zenglin Shi , Pei Liu , Tong Su , Yunpeng Wu , Kuien Liu , Yu Song , Meng Wang

Learning to Optimize (L2O) enhances optimization efficiency with integrated neural networks. L2O paradigms achieve great outcomes, e.g., refitting optimizer, generating unseen solutions iteratively or directly. However, conventional L2O…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Mingjia Shi , Ruihan Lin , Xuxi Chen , Yuhao Zhou , Zezhen Ding , Pingzhi Li , Tong Wang , Kai Wang , Zhangyang Wang , Jiheng Zhang , Tianlong Chen

Machine unlearning algorithms are increasingly important as legal concerns arise around the provenance of training data, but verifying the success of unlearning is often difficult. Provable guarantees for unlearning are often limited to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Stanley Wei , Sadhika Malladi , Sanjeev Arora , Amartya Sanyal

Knowledge distillation (KD) is generally considered as a technique for performing model compression and learned-label smoothing. However, in this paper, we study and investigate the KD approach from a new perspective: we study its efficacy…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Nandan Kumar Jha , Rajat Saini , Sparsh Mittal

End-to-end training with back propagation is the standard method for training deep neural networks. However, as networks become deeper and bigger, end-to-end training becomes more challenging: highly non-convex models gets stuck easily in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Laëtitia Shao , Max Moroz , Elad Eban , Yair Movshovitz-Attias

We present Knowledge Distillation with Meta Learning (MetaDistil), a simple yet effective alternative to traditional knowledge distillation (KD) methods where the teacher model is fixed during training. We show the teacher network can learn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Wangchunshu Zhou , Canwen Xu , Julian McAuley

The key components of machine learning are data samples for training, model for learning patterns, and loss function for optimizing accuracy. Analogously, unlearning can potentially be achieved through anti-data samples (or anti-samples),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Yash Sinha , Murari Mandal , Mohan Kankanhalli

Here, we show that current LLM unlearning methods inherently reduce models' robustness, causing them to misbehave even when a single non-adversarial forget-token is present in the retain-query. Toward understanding underlying causes, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Dang Huu-Tien , Hoang Thanh-Tung , Anh Bui , Minh-Phuong Nguyen , Le-Minh Nguyen , Naoya Inoue

The core of knowledge distillation lies in transferring the teacher's rich 'dark knowledge'-subtle probabilistic patterns that reveal how classes are related and the distribution of uncertainties. While this idea is well established,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jeonghyun Kim , SooKyung Kim , Richeng Xuan , Hyunsoo Cho