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Related papers: Explainable LLM Unlearning Through Reasoning

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Machine unlearning aims to remove sensitive or undesired data from large language models. However, recent studies suggest that unlearning is often shallow, claiming that removed knowledge can easily be recovered. In this work, we critically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Zhili Feng , Yixuan Even Xu , Alexander Robey , Robert Kirk , Xander Davies , Yarin Gal , Avi Schwarzschild , J. Zico Kolter

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation, their inherent tendency toward verbatim memorization of training data introduces critical risks like copyright infringement, insecure emission, and deprecated API utilization,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Xue Jiang , Yihong Dong , Huangzhao Zhang , Tangxinyu Wang , Zheng Fang , Yingwei Ma , Rongyu Cao , Binhua Li , Zhi Jin , Wenpin Jiao , Yongbin Li , Ge Li

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress from pre-training on and memorizing a wide range of textual data, however, this process might suffer from privacy issues and violations of data protection regulations. As a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Jiaao Chen , Diyi Yang

As large language models (LLMs) are applied across diverse domains, the ability to selectively unlearn specific information is becoming increasingly essential. For instance, LLMs are expected to selectively provide confidential information…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Shota Takashiro , Takeshi Kojima , Andrew Gambardella , Qi Cao , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Our goal is to understand how post-training methods, such as fine-tuning, alignment, and unlearning, modify language model behavior and representations. We are particularly interested in the brittle nature of these modifications that makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Timothy Qian , Vinith Suriyakumar , Ashia Wilson , Dylan Hadfield-Menell

Machine unlearning, the study of efficiently removing the impact of specific training instances on a model, has garnered increased attention in recent years due to regulatory guidelines such as the \emph{Right to be Forgotten}. Achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Martin Pawelczyk , Seth Neel , Himabindu Lakkaraju

LLM unlearning is a technique to remove the impacts of undesirable knowledge from the model without retraining from scratch, which is indispensable towards trustworthy AI. Existing unlearning methods face significant limitations:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yisheng Zhong , Zhengbang Yang , Zhuangdi Zhu

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

Machine Unlearning (MU) has recently gained considerable attention due to its potential to achieve Safe AI by removing the influence of specific data from trained Machine Learning (ML) models. This process, known as knowledge removal,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Ziyao Liu , Huanyi Ye , Chen Chen , Yongsen Zheng , Kwok-Yan Lam

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly costly to deploy, motivating extensive research on model pruning. However, most existing studies focus on instruction-following LLMs, leaving it unclear whether established pruning strategies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Longwei Ding , Anhao Zhao , Fanghua Ye , Ziyang Chen , Xiaoyu Shen

The LLM unlearning technique has recently been introduced to comply with data regulations and address the safety and ethical concerns of LLMs by removing the undesired data-model influence. However, state-of-the-art unlearning methods face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Chongyu Fan , Jinghan Jia , Yihua Zhang , Anil Ramakrishna , Mingyi Hong , Sijia Liu

With the improving semantic understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), they exhibit a greater awareness and alignment with human values, but this comes at the cost of transparency. Although promising results are achieved via…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Nafis Tanveer Islam , Zhiming Zhao

Jailbreaking attacks can enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to bypass the safeguard and generate harmful content. Existing jailbreaking defense methods have failed to address the fundamental issue that harmful knowledge resides within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Weikai Lu , Ziqian Zeng , Jianwei Wang , Zhengdong Lu , Zelin Chen , Huiping Zhuang , Cen Chen

Foundation models have transformed multimedia analysis by enabling robust and transferable representations across diverse modalities and tasks. However, their static deployment conflicts with growing societal and regulatory demands --…

Large language models (LLMs) inevitably memorize sensitive, copyrighted, and harmful knowledge from the training corpus; therefore, it is crucial to erase this knowledge from the models. Machine unlearning is a promising solution for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhuoran Jin , Pengfei Cao , Chenhao Wang , Zhitao He , Hongbang Yuan , Jiachun Li , Yubo Chen , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Large language models show impressive abilities in memorizing world knowledge, which leads to concerns regarding memorization of private information, toxic or sensitive knowledge, and copyrighted content. We introduce the problem of Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yu Wang , Ruihan Wu , Zexue He , Xiusi Chen , Julian McAuley

Large language model (LLM) unlearning has become a critical mechanism for removing undesired data, knowledge, or behaviors from pre-trained models while retaining their general utility. Yet, with the rise of open-weight LLMs, we ask: can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Bingqi Shang , Yiwei Chen , Yihua Zhang , Bingquan Shen , Sijia Liu

Language models can retain dangerous knowledge and skills even after extensive safety fine-tuning, posing both misuse and misalignment risks. Recent studies show that even specialized unlearning methods can be easily reversed. To address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Filip Sondej , Yushi Yang , Mikołaj Kniejski , Marcel Windys

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

Machine unlearning has gained increasing attention in recent years, as a promising technique to selectively remove unwanted privacy or copyrighted information from Large Language Models that are trained on a massive scale of human data.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Junyi Li , Yongqiang Chen , Ningning Ding