Revisiting Who's Harry Potter: Towards Targeted Unlearning from a Causal Intervention Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liu, Yujian, Zhang, Yang, Jaakkola, Tommi, Chang, Shiyu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Liu, Yujian
Zhang, Yang
Jaakkola, Tommi
Chang, Shiyu
author_facet Liu, Yujian
Zhang, Yang
Jaakkola, Tommi
Chang, Shiyu
contents This paper investigates Who's Harry Potter (WHP), a pioneering yet insufficiently understood method for LLM unlearning. We explore it in two steps. First, we introduce a new task of LLM targeted unlearning, where given an unlearning target (e.g., a person) and some unlearning documents, we aim to unlearn only the information about the target, rather than everything in the unlearning documents. We further argue that a successful unlearning should satisfy criteria such as not outputting gibberish, not fabricating facts about the unlearning target, and not releasing factual information under jailbreak attacks. Second, we construct a causal intervention framework for targeted unlearning, where the knowledge of the unlearning target is modeled as a confounder between LLM input and output, and the unlearning process as a deconfounding process. This framework justifies and extends WHP, deriving a simple unlearning algorithm that includes WHP as a special case. Experiments on existing and new datasets show that our approach, without explicitly optimizing for the aforementioned criteria, achieves competitive performance in all of them. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/causal_unlearn.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_16997
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Who's Harry Potter: Towards Targeted Unlearning from a Causal Intervention Perspective
Liu, Yujian
Zhang, Yang
Jaakkola, Tommi
Chang, Shiyu
Computation and Language
This paper investigates Who's Harry Potter (WHP), a pioneering yet insufficiently understood method for LLM unlearning. We explore it in two steps. First, we introduce a new task of LLM targeted unlearning, where given an unlearning target (e.g., a person) and some unlearning documents, we aim to unlearn only the information about the target, rather than everything in the unlearning documents. We further argue that a successful unlearning should satisfy criteria such as not outputting gibberish, not fabricating facts about the unlearning target, and not releasing factual information under jailbreak attacks. Second, we construct a causal intervention framework for targeted unlearning, where the knowledge of the unlearning target is modeled as a confounder between LLM input and output, and the unlearning process as a deconfounding process. This framework justifies and extends WHP, deriving a simple unlearning algorithm that includes WHP as a special case. Experiments on existing and new datasets show that our approach, without explicitly optimizing for the aforementioned criteria, achieves competitive performance in all of them. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/causal_unlearn.git.
title Revisiting Who's Harry Potter: Towards Targeted Unlearning from a Causal Intervention Perspective
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16997