LLM Unlearning via Loss Adjustment with Only Forget Data
Unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for ensuring ethical and responsible AI use, especially in addressing privacy leak, bias, safety, and evolving regulations. Existing approaches to LLM unlearning often rely on retain data or a reference LLM, yet they struggle to adequately balance unlearning performance with overall model utility. This challenge arises because leveraging explicit retain data or implicit knowledge of retain data from a reference LLM to fine-tune the model tends to blur the boundaries between the forgotten and retain data, as different queries often elicit similar responses. In this work, we propose eliminating the need to retain data or the reference LLM for response calibration in LLM unlearning. Recognizing that directly applying gradient ascent on the forget data often leads to optimization instability and poor performance, our method guides the LLM on what not to respond to, and importantly, how to respond, based on the forget data. Hence, we introduce Forget data only Loss AjustmenT (FLAT), a "flat" loss adjustment approach which addresses these issues by maximizing f-divergence between the available template answer and the forget answer only w.r.t. the forget data. The variational form of the defined f-divergence theoretically provides a way of loss adjustment by assigning different importance weights for the learning w.r.t. template responses and the forgetting of responses subject to unlearning. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach not only achieves superior unlearning performance compared to existing methods but also minimizes the impact on the model's retained capabilities, ensuring high utility across diverse tasks, including copyrighted content unlearning on Harry Potter dataset and MUSE Benchmark, and entity unlearning on the TOFU dataset.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Erase at the Core: Representation Unlearning for Machine Unlearning
Many approximate machine unlearning methods demonstrate strong logit-level forgetting -- such as near-zero accuracy on the forget set -- yet continue to preserve substantial information within their internal feature repr…
Reveal and Release: Iterative LLM Unlearning with Self-generated Data
Large language model (LLM) unlearning has demonstrated effectiveness in removing the influence of undesirable data (also known as forget data). Existing approaches typically assume full access to the forget dataset, over…
iShumei-Chinchunmei at SemEval-2025 Task 4: A balanced forgetting and retention multi-task framework using effective unlearning loss
As the Large Language Model (LLM) gains widespread adoption, increasing attention has been given to the challenge of making LLM forget non-compliant data memorized during its pre-training. Machine Unlearning focuses on e…
VLA-Forget: Vision-Language-Action Unlearning for Embodied Foundation Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models are emerging as embodied foundation models for robotic manipulation, but their deployment introduces a new unlearning challenge: removing unsafe, spurious, or privacy-sensitive behavio…
BLUR: A Bi-Level Optimization Approach for LLM Unlearning
Enabling large language models (LLMs) to unlearn knowledge and capabilities acquired during training has proven vital for ensuring compliance with data regulations and promoting ethical practices in generative AI. Althou…