Towards Robust and Parameter-Efficient Knowledge Unlearning for LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cha, Sungmin, Cho, Sungjun, Hwang, Dasol, Lee, Moontae
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cha, Sungmin
Cho, Sungjun
Hwang, Dasol
Lee, Moontae
author_facet Cha, Sungmin
Cho, Sungjun
Hwang, Dasol
Lee, Moontae
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and memorization capabilities via pretraining on massive textual corpora. However, this poses risk of privacy and copyright violations, highlighting the need for efficient machine unlearning methods that remove sensitive data without retraining from scratch. While Gradient Ascent (GA) is commonly used to unlearn by reducing the likelihood of generating unwanted content, it leads to unstable optimization and catastrophic forgetting of retrained knowledge. We find that combining GA with low-rank adaptation results in poor trade-offs between computational cost and generative performance. To address these challenges, we propose Low-rank Knowledge Unlearning (LoKU), a novel framework that enables robust and efficient unlearning for LLMs. First, we introduce Inverted Hinge Loss, which suppresses unwanted tokens while maintaining fluency by boosting the probability of the next most likely token. Second, we develop a data-adaptive initialization for LoRA adapters via low-rank approximation weighted with relative Fisher information, thereby focusing updates on parameters critical for removing targeted knowledge. Experiments on the Training Data Extraction Challenge dataset using GPT-Neo models as well as on the TOFU benchmark with Phi-1.5B and Llama2-7B models demonstrate that our approach effectively removes sensitive information while maintaining reasoning and generative capabilities with minimal impact. Our implementation can be found in https://github.com/csm9493/efficient-llm-unlearning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_06621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Robust and Parameter-Efficient Knowledge Unlearning for LLMs
Cha, Sungmin
Cho, Sungjun
Hwang, Dasol
Lee, Moontae
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and memorization capabilities via pretraining on massive textual corpora. However, this poses risk of privacy and copyright violations, highlighting the need for efficient machine unlearning methods that remove sensitive data without retraining from scratch. While Gradient Ascent (GA) is commonly used to unlearn by reducing the likelihood of generating unwanted content, it leads to unstable optimization and catastrophic forgetting of retrained knowledge. We find that combining GA with low-rank adaptation results in poor trade-offs between computational cost and generative performance. To address these challenges, we propose Low-rank Knowledge Unlearning (LoKU), a novel framework that enables robust and efficient unlearning for LLMs. First, we introduce Inverted Hinge Loss, which suppresses unwanted tokens while maintaining fluency by boosting the probability of the next most likely token. Second, we develop a data-adaptive initialization for LoRA adapters via low-rank approximation weighted with relative Fisher information, thereby focusing updates on parameters critical for removing targeted knowledge. Experiments on the Training Data Extraction Challenge dataset using GPT-Neo models as well as on the TOFU benchmark with Phi-1.5B and Llama2-7B models demonstrate that our approach effectively removes sensitive information while maintaining reasoning and generative capabilities with minimal impact. Our implementation can be found in https://github.com/csm9493/efficient-llm-unlearning.
title Towards Robust and Parameter-Efficient Knowledge Unlearning for LLMs
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06621