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LLMs have been found to memorize training textual sequences and regurgitate verbatim said sequences during text generation time. This fact is known to be the cause of privacy and related (e.g., copyright) problems. Unlearning in LLMs then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 George-Octavian Barbulescu , Peter Triantafillou

Current unlearning and safety training methods consistently fail to remove dangerous knowledge from language models. We identify the root cause - unlearning targets representations which are too general - and develop a highly selective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Filip Sondej , Yushi Yang

Exact unlearning was first introduced as a privacy mechanism that allowed a user to retract their data from machine learning models on request. Shortly after, inexact schemes were proposed to mitigate the impractical costs associated with…

Machine unlearning allows data owners to erase the impact of their specified data from trained models. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that adversaries can recover the erased data, posing serious threats to user privacy. An…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Weiqi Wang , Chenhan Zhang , Zhiyi Tian , Shushu Liu , Shui Yu

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but also pose risks by learning and generating copyrighted material, leading to significant legal and ethical concerns. In a potential real-world scenario,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Guangyao Dou

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have enabled strong chain-of-thought (CoT) generation through test-time computation. While these multi-step reasoning capabilities represent a major milestone in language model performance,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Changsheng Wang , Chongyu Fan , Yihua Zhang , Jinghan Jia , Dennis Wei , Parikshit Ram , Nathalie Baracaldo , Sijia Liu

This study reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing aligned LLMs predominantly respond to unsafe queries with refusals, which often begin with a fixed set of prefixes…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yangyang Guo , Ziwei Xu , Si Liu , Zhiming Zheng , Mohan Kankanhalli

Machine unlearning has emerged as a critical capability for addressing privacy, safety, and regulatory concerns in large language models (LLMs). Existing methods operate at the sequence level, applying uniform updates across all tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Jiawei Wu , Doudou Zhou

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve remarkable capabilities but can inadvertently memorize privacy-sensitive information. Although existing unlearning methods can remove such knowledge, they fail to achieve benign forgetting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Zhen Zeng , Leijiang Gu , Zhangling Duan , Feng Li , Zenglin Shi , Cees G. M. Snoek , Meng Wang

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

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements, drawing significant attention from the research community. Their capabilities are largely attributed to large-scale architectures, which require extensive…

Large language models (LLMs) trained on unfiltered corpora inherently risk retaining sensitive information, necessitating selective knowledge unlearning for regulatory compliance and ethical safety. However, existing parameter-modifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zhaokun Wang , Jinyu Guo , Jingwen Pu , Hongli Pu , Meng Yang , Xunlei Chen , Jie Ou , Wenyi Li , Guangchun Luo , Wenhong Tian

Large language models are finetuned to refuse questions about hazardous knowledge, but these protections can often be bypassed. Unlearning methods aim at completely removing hazardous capabilities from models and make them inaccessible to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jakub Łucki , Boyi Wei , Yangsibo Huang , Peter Henderson , Florian Tramèr , Javier Rando

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools with profound societal impacts, yet their ability to generate responses to diverse and uncontrolled inputs leaves them vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While existing defenses often struggle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Samuel Simko , Mrinmaya Sachan , Bernhard Schölkopf , Zhijing Jin

With the implementation of personal data privacy regulations, the field of machine learning (ML) faces the challenge of the "right to be forgotten". Machine unlearning has emerged to address this issue, aiming to delete data and reduce its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yi Xu

Machine unlearning is a promising approach to mitigate undesirable memorization of training data in ML models. However, in this work we show that existing approaches for unlearning in LLMs are surprisingly susceptible to a simple set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Shengyuan Hu , Yiwei Fu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Virginia Smith

Large language models (LLMs) inherently absorb harmful knowledge, misinformation, and personal data during pretraining on large-scale web corpora, with no native mechanism for selective removal. While machine unlearning offers a principled…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jagadeesh Rachapudi , Pranav Singh , Ritali Vatsi , Praful Hambarde , Amit Shukla

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

Machine unlearning is a process to remove specific data points from a trained model while maintaining the performance on the retain data, addressing privacy or legal requirements. Despite its importance, existing unlearning evaluations tend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yongwoo Kim , Sungmin Cha , Donghyun Kim