Unveiling Entity-Level Unlearning for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Analysis (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on instance-level unlearning, specifically removing predefined instances containing sensitive content. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to erase entity-related knowledge from the target model completely by analyzing the forget set and its size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task systematically evaluates popular unlearning algorithms and reveals that the knowledge coverage of the forget set and its size play pivotal roles. |
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| Challenge: | Instruction-following large language models (LLMs) inadvertently disclose private, sensitive information to their users, underscoring the need for machine unlearning techniques to remove selective information from the models. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimal transport-based unlearning method that utilizes the Wasserstein distance from the model’s initial parameters to achieve more effective and fine-grained unlearning. |
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Which Retain Set Matters for LLM Unlearning? A Case Study on Entity Unlearning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are prone to retaining unauthorized or sensitive information from their training data, which raises privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a group of queries that share similar syntactic structures with the data targeted for removal to investigate the effects of unlearning on various subsets of the retain set. |
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Unlearn What You Want to Forget: Efficient Unlearning for LLMs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can be used to memorize a vast amount of data, but can suffer from privacy issues and data protection violations. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient unlearning framework that could update LLMs without retraining them . they introduce lightweight unlearning layers learned with a selective teacher-student objective into transformers . |
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UNLEARN Efficient Removal of Knowledge in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel in many tasks but are outperformed by specialized tools for certain tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses subspace techniques to selectively remove knowledge . they propose 'unlearn' method that can forget or unlear the knowledge without retraining . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods for forgetting target knowledge while preserving related knowledge. |
Machine Unlearning of Pre-trained Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using curated datasets, we establish a robust benchmark for unlearning performance, demonstrating that these methods are over 105 times more computationally efficient than retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for machine unlearning in pre-trained LLMs and integrate gradient ascent with gradient descent on in-distribution data to achieve robustness. |
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Towards Robust Evaluation of Unlearning in LLMs via Data Transformations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Abhinav Joshi, Shaswati Saha, Divyaksh Shukla, Sriram Vema, Harsh Jhamtani, Manas Gaur, Ashutosh Modi
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be a great success in a wide range of applications ranging from regular NLP-based use cases to AI agents. |
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Dissecting Fine-Tuning Unlearning in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning-based unlearning are ineffective at completely erasing model-embedded knowledge, but their true effectiveness remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to use activation patching and parameter restoration experiments to examine the limitations of fine-tuning-based unlearning methods for erasing harmful, sensitive, or copyrighted information within large language models. |
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Cross-Lingual Unlearning of Selective Knowledge in Multilingual Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models memorize large amounts of information, raising significant safety concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to machine unlearning for multilingual language models that selectively erases information across different languages while maintaining overall performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is compared with existing unlearning baselines and set a new standard for secure and adaptable multilingual language models. |
Thesis Proposal: Targeted and Unified Cross-Lingual Unlearning from Multilingual Language Models (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models trained on corpora scraped from the web can reproduce sensitive and copyright-protected data. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend existing benchmarks to multilingual data by compiling parallel translations of question-answer pairs consisting of real-world facts and synthetic personally identifiable information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset will include translations of question-answer pairs consisting of real-world facts and synthetic personally identifiable information. |
ReLearn: Unlearning via Learning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Liming Yang, Sendong Zhao, Shumin Deng, Mengru Wang, Bryan Hooi, Nay Oo, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models often rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. |
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| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves targeted forgetting while preserving high-quality outputs. |