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The objective of digital forgetting is, given a model with undesirable knowledge or behavior, obtain a new model where the detected issues are no longer present. The motivations for forgetting include privacy protection, copyright…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Alberto Blanco-Justicia , Najeeb Jebreel , Benet Manzanares , David Sánchez , Josep Domingo-Ferrer , Guillem Collell , Kuan Eeik Tan

Machine learning and data systems increasingly function as infrastructures of memory: they ingest, store, and operationalize traces of personal, political, and cultural life. Yet contemporary governance demands credible forms of forgetting,…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Viktoriia Makovska , George Fletcher , Julia Stoyanovich , Tetiana Zakharchenko

Machine unlearning offers a practical alternative to avoid full model re-training by approximately removing the influence of specific user data. While existing methods certify unlearning via statistical indistinguishability from re-trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Hsiang Hsu , Pradeep Niroula , Zichang He , Ivan Brugere , Freddy Lecue , Chun-Fu Chen

Large language models often lose previously aligned safety behaviors when fine-tuned on benign data, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Prior work shows that adding random safety examples can mitigate this effect, but it remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Anh Pham , Mihir Thalanki , Michael Sun , Aditya Chaloo , Ankita Gupta , Tian Xia , Aditya Mate , Ehimwenma Nosakhare , Soundararajan Srinivasan

As generative models become increasingly powerful and pervasive, the ability to unlearn specific data, whether due to privacy concerns, legal requirements, or the correction of harmful content, has become increasingly important. Unlike in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Pinak Mandal , Georg A. Gottwald

Machine unlearning seeks to remove the influence of particular data or class from trained models to meet privacy, legal, or ethical requirements. Existing unlearning methods tend to forget shallowly: phenomenon of an unlearned model pretend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Jaeheun Jung , Bosung Jung , Suhyun Bae , Donghun Lee

Machine Unlearning (MU) aims at removing the influence of specific data points from a trained model, striving to achieve this at a fraction of the cost of full model retraining. In this paper, we analyze the efficiency of unlearning methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-24 Martin Van Waerebeke , Marco Lorenzi , Giovanni Neglia , Kevin Scaman

Humans can continuously learn new knowledge. However, machine learning models suffer from drastic dropping in performance on previous tasks after learning new tasks. Cognitive science points out that the competition of similar knowledge is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Runqi Wang , Yuxiang Bao , Baochang Zhang , Jianzhuang Liu , Wentao Zhu , Guodong Guo

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

Machine Unlearning has recently garnered significant attention, aiming to selectively remove knowledge associated with specific data while preserving the model's performance on the remaining data. A fundamental challenge in this process is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Gaurav Patel , Qiang Qiu

Class-level machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specified classes while preserving model utility on retained classes. Existing methods are commonly evaluated by retain-set accuracy, forget-set accuracy, and unlearning time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Weidong Zheng , Kongyang Chen , Yuanwei Guo , Yatie Xiao

We introduce \textbf{Knowledge Swapping}, a novel task designed to selectively regulate knowledge of a pretrained model by enabling the forgetting of user\-specified information, retaining essential knowledge, and acquiring new knowledge…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Mingyu Xing , Lechao Cheng , Shengeng Tang , Yaxiong Wang , Zhun Zhong , Meng Wang

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

The Right to be Forgotten is a core principle outlined by regulatory frameworks such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This principle allows individuals to request that their personal data be deleted from deployed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Alex Oesterling , Jiaqi Ma , Flavio P. Calmon , Hima Lakkaraju

Current LLM unlearning methods face a critical security vulnerability that undermines their fundamental purpose: while they appear to successfully remove sensitive or harmful knowledge, this ``forgotten" information remains precariously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Wenhan Wu , Zheyuan Liu , Chongyang Gao , Ren Wang , Kaize Ding

Machine learning models may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, posing risks of privacy breaches, security vulnerabilities, and performance degradation. To address these issues, machine unlearning has emerged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Jie Xu , Zihan Wu , Cong Wang , Xiaohua Jia

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

Machine unlearning is an emerging technology that has come to attract widespread attention. A number of factors, including regulations and laws, privacy, and usability concerns, have resulted in this need to allow a trained model to forget…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Heng Xu , Tianqing Zhu , Lefeng Zhang , Wanlei Zhou , Wei Zhao

Deployed text-to-image diffusion models increasingly require post-hoc concept unlearning for copyright claims, artist opt-outs, safety updates, and protected-content mitigation without full retraining. A central challenge is erase-retain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ashutosh Ranjan , Vivek Srivastava , Shirish Karande , Murari Mandal

We propose new methodologies for both unlearning random set of samples and class unlearning and show that they outperform existing methods. The main driver of our unlearning methods is the similarity of predictions to a retrained model on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny