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The deployment of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini has shown their powerful natural language generation capabilities. However, these models can inadvertently learn and retain sensitive information and harmful content…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shang Wang , Tianqing Zhu , Dayong Ye , Wanlei Zhou

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) often memorize sensitive or harmful information, necessitating effective machine unlearning techniques. While existing parameter-efficient unlearning methods have shown promise, they still struggle with the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zeguan Xiao , Lang Mo , Yun Chen , Lei Yang , Jiehui Zhao , Lili Yang , Guanhua Chen

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have recently gained considerable attention due to the powerful reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Existing research predominantly focuses on enhancing the task performance of these agents in diverse…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Dayong Ye , Tainqing Zhu , Congcong Zhu , Feng He , Qi He , Shang Wang , Bo Liu , Wanlei Zhou

Large language model (LLM) post-training enhances latent skills, unlocks value alignment, improves performance, and enables domain adaptation. Unfortunately, post-training is known to induce forgetting, especially in the ubiquitous use-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lukas Thede , Stefan Winzeck , Zeynep Akata , Jonathan Richard Schwarz

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data from a model without requiring full retraining. This capability is crucial for ensuring privacy, safety, and regulatory compliance. Therefore, verifying whether a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Liran Cohen , Yaniv Nemcovesky , Avi Mendelson

Catastrophic forgetting (CF) poses a significant challenge in machine learning, where a model forgets previously learned information upon learning new tasks. Despite the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they continue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Gangwei Jiang , Caigao Jiang , Zhaoyi Li , Siqiao Xue , Jun Zhou , Linqi Song , Defu Lian , Ying Wei

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can cause them to lose their general capabilities. However, the intrinsic mechanisms behind such forgetting remain unexplored. In this paper, we begin by examining this phenomenon by focusing on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Gangwei Jiang , Zhaoyi Li , Defu Lian , Ying Wei

The ability to selectively remove knowledge from LLMs is highly desirable. However, existing methods often struggle with balancing unlearning efficacy and retain model utility, and lack controllability at inference time to emulate base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 William F. Shen , Xinchi Qiu , Meghdad Kurmanji , Alex Iacob , Lorenzo Sani , Yihong Chen , Nicola Cancedda , Nicholas D. Lane

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

Machine unlearning seeks to remove the influence of specific training data from a model, a need driven by privacy regulations and robustness concerns. Existing approaches typically modify model parameters, but such updates can be unstable,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Antonio Almudévar , Alfonso Ortega

Machine unlearning aims to erase requested data from trained models without full retraining. For Reasoning Multimodal Large Language Models (RMLLMs), this is uniquely challenging: intermediate chain-of-thought steps can still leak sensitive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Hongji Li , Junchi yao , Manjiang Yu , Priyanka Singh , Xue Li , Di Wang , Lijie Hu

With the passage of the Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) regulations and the scaling up of language model training datasets, research on model unlearning in large language models (LLMs) has become more crucial. Before the era of LLMs, machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Bichen Wang , Yuzhe Zi , Yixin Sun , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin

Humans can quickly learn new behaviors by leveraging background world knowledge. In contrast, agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) typically learn behaviors from scratch. We thus propose a novel approach that uses the vast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 William Chen , Oier Mees , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

In continual learning scenarios, catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks is a critical issue, making it essential to effectively measure such forgetting. Recently, there has been growing interest in focusing on representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Joonkyu Kim , Yejin Kim , Jy-yong Sohn

Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising privacy and legal concerns. Due to the high cost of retraining from scratch, researchers attempt to employ machine unlearning to remove specific content…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xiaojian Yuan , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Kejiang Chen , Weiming Zhang , Min Lin

We unveil that internal representations in large language models (LLMs) serve as reliable proxies of learned knowledge, and propose RECALL, a novel representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Bowen Wang , Haiyuan Wan , Liwen Shi , Chen Yang , Peng He , Yue Ma , Haochen Han , Wenhao Li , Tiao Tan , Yongjian Li , Fangming Liu , Yifan Gong , Sheng Zhang

We study how to perform unlearning, i.e. forgetting undesirable misbehaviors, on large language models (LLMs). We show at least three scenarios of aligning LLMs with human preferences can benefit from unlearning: (1) removing harmful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Yuanshun Yao , Xiaojun Xu , Yang Liu