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Towards Safer Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning

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arxiv 2402.10058 v2 pith:CXHUWOCP submitted 2024-02-15 cs.CL

Towards Safer Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning

classification cs.CL
keywords knowledgeharmfulllmsmodelpromptsnormalstageunlearning
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated their vast potential across various domains, attributed to their extensive pretraining knowledge and exceptional generalizability. However, LLMs often encounter challenges in generating harmful content when faced with problematic prompts. To address this problem, existing work attempted to implement a gradient ascent based approach to prevent LLMs from producing harmful output. While these methods can be effective, they frequently impact the model utility in responding to normal prompts. To address this gap, we introduce Selective Knowledge negation Unlearning (SKU), a novel unlearning framework for LLMs, designed to eliminate harmful knowledge while preserving utility on normal prompts. Specifically, SKU is consisted of two stages: harmful knowledge acquisition stage and knowledge negation stage. The first stage aims to identify and acquire harmful knowledge within the model, whereas the second is dedicated to remove this knowledge. SKU selectively isolates and removes harmful knowledge in model parameters, ensuring the model's performance remains robust on normal prompts. Our experiments conducted across various LLM architectures demonstrate that SKU identifies a good balance point between removing harmful information and preserving utility.

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Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  2. Is your algorithm unlearning or untraining?

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    Machine unlearning conflates reversing the influence of specific training examples (untraining) with removing the full underlying distribution or behavior (unlearning).

  3. ASRU: Activation Steering Meets Reinforcement Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ASRU combines activation redirection and reward-optimized fine-tuning to unlearn cross-modal sensitive knowledge in MLLMs, reporting +24.6% better unlearning effectiveness and 5.8x higher generation quality on Qwen3-V...

  4. Null Space Constrained Contrastive Visual Forgetting for MLLM Unlearning

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A contrastive visual forgetting technique constrained to the null space of retained knowledge enables targeted unlearning of visual concepts in MLLMs while preserving non-target visual and all textual knowledge.

  5. Representation-Guided Parameter-Efficient LLM Unlearning

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    REGLU guides LoRA-based unlearning via representation subspaces and orthogonal regularization to outperform prior methods on forget-retain trade-off in LLM benchmarks.

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  8. Distribution Preference Optimization: A Fine-grained Perspective for LLM Unlearning

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  10. Machine Unlearning: A Comprehensive Survey

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