Null Space Constrained Contrastive Visual Forgetting for MLLM Unlearning
The core challenge of machine unlearning is to strike a balance between target knowledge removal and non-target knowledge retention. In the context of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), this challenge becomes even more pronounced, as knowledge is further divided into visual and textual modalities that are tightly intertwined. In this paper, we introduce an MLLM unlearning approach that aims to forget target visual knowledge while preserving non-target visual knowledge and all textual knowledge. Specifically, we freeze the LLM backbone and achieve unlearning by fine-tuning the visual module. First, we propose a Contrastive Visual Forgetting (CVF) mechanism to separate target visual knowledge from retained visual knowledge, guiding the representations of target visual concepts toward appropriate regions in the feature space. Second, we identify the null space associated with retained knowledge and constrain the unlearning process within this space, thereby significantly mitigating degradation in knowledge retention. Third, beyond static unlearning scenarios, we extend our approach to continual unlearning, where forgetting requests arrive sequentially. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves a strong balance between effective forgetting and robust knowledge retention.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
GNSP: Gradient Null Space Projection for Preserving Cross-Modal Alignment in VLMs Continual Learning
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization by aligning visual and textual modalities in a shared embedding space. However, when continuously fine-tuned on diverse tasks, C…
Zero-shot GeneralizationKnowledge DistillationCross-Modal RetrievalContinual LearningLearning in the Null Space: Small Singular Values for Continual Learning
Alleviating catastrophic forgetting while enabling further learning is a primary challenge in continual learning (CL). Orthogonal-based training methods have gained attention for their efficiency and strong theoretical p…
Continual LearningMitigating the Safety Alignment Tax with Null-Space Constrained Policy Optimization
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, it is important to ensure their behaviors align with human values, societal norms, and ethical principles. However, safety alignment u…
Reinforcement LearningBalancing Stability and Plasticity through Advanced Null Space in Continual Learning
Continual learning is a learning paradigm that learns tasks sequentially with resources constraints, in which the key challenge is stability-plasticity dilemma, i.e., it is uneasy to simultaneously have the stability to …
Continual LearningLearning Federated Visual Prompt in Null Space for MRI Reconstruction
Federated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction enables multiple hospitals to collaborate distributedly without aggregating local data, thereby protecting patient privacy. However, the data heterogeneity caused…
MRI Reconstruction