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Related papers: SoK: Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models

200 papers

Driven by privacy protection laws and regulations, unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is gaining increasing attention. However, current research often neglects the interpretability of the unlearning process, particularly concerning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Xiaohua Feng , Yuyuan Li , Chengye Wang , Junlin Liu , Li Zhang , Chaochao Chen

Large language models (LLMs) learn undesirable properties during pretraining, including dangerous knowledge and toxic text generation. Just as post-training uses different objectives to shape different behaviors, we argue that unlearning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Berk Atil , Vipul Gupta , Rebecca J. Passonneau

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

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

Large language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable skills across various domains. Understanding the mechanisms behind their abilities and implementing controls over them is becoming increasingly important for developing better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yongce Li , Chung-En Sun , Tsui-Wei Weng

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into real-world applications, raising concerns about privacy, security and the need to remove undesirable knowledge. Machine Unlearning has emerged as a promising solution, yet faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yisheng Zhong , Zhengbang Yang , Zhuangdi Zhu

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

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 Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate structured chains of thought (CoTs) before producing final answers, making them especially vulnerable to knowledge leakage through intermediate reasoning steps. Yet, the memorization of sensitive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Tuan Le , Wei Qian , Mengdi Huai

The widespread popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), partly due to their unique ability to perform in-context learning, has also brought to light the importance of ethical and safety considerations when deploying these pre-trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Karuna Bhaila , Minh-Hao Van , Xintao Wu

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains, yet their utility comes with significant challenges related to outdated or problematic knowledge embedded during pretraining. This paper addresses the challenge of modifying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Akshaj Kumar Veldanda , Shi-Xiong Zhang , Anirban Das , Supriyo Chakraborty , Stephen Rawls , Sambit Sahu , Milind Naphade

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

Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) is critical for regulatory compliance and for building ethical generative AI systems that avoid producing private, toxic, illegal, or copyrighted content. Despite rapid progress, in this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hadi Reisizadeh , Jiajun Ruan , Yiwei Chen , Soumyadeep Pal , Sijia Liu , Mingyi Hong

As the applications of large language models (LLMs) expand across diverse fields, the ability of these models to adapt to ongoing changes in data, tasks, and user preferences becomes crucial. Traditional training methods, relying on static…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Junhao Zheng , Shengjie Qiu , Chengming Shi , Qianli Ma

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

Unlearning aims to remove copyrighted, sensitive, or private content from large language models (LLMs) without a full retraining. In this work, we develop a multi-task unlearning benchmark (LUME) which features three tasks: (1) unlearn…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Anil Ramakrishna , Yixin Wan , Xiaomeng Jin , Kai-Wei Chang , Zhiqi Bu , Bhanukiran Vinzamuri , Volkan Cevher , Mingyi Hong , Rahul Gupta

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in safety-critical and regulated sectors, the retention of sensitive or prohibited knowledge introduces escalating risks, ranging from privacy leakage to regulatory non-compliance to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Taozhao Chen , Linghan Huang , Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo , Huaming Chen

Large language model unlearning aims to remove harmful information that LLMs have learnt to prevent their use for malicious purposes. LLMU and RMU have been proposed as two methods for LLM unlearning, achieving impressive results on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Jai Doshi , Asa Cooper Stickland

In recent years, unlearning techniques, which are methods for inducing a model to "forget" previously learned information, have attracted attention as a way to address privacy and copyright concerns in large language models (LLMs) and large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Tatsuki Kawakami , Kazuki Egashira , Atsuyuki Miyai , Go Irie , Kiyoharu Aizawa

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