MEOW: MEMOry Supervised LLM Unlearning Via Inverted Facts

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gu, Tianle, Huang, Kexin, Luo, Ruilin, Yao, Yuanqi, Yang, Yujiu, Teng, Yan, Wang, Yingchun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Gu, Tianle
Huang, Kexin
Luo, Ruilin
Yao, Yuanqi
Yang, Yujiu
Teng, Yan
Wang, Yingchun
author_facet Gu, Tianle
Huang, Kexin
Luo, Ruilin
Yao, Yuanqi
Yang, Yujiu
Teng, Yan
Wang, Yingchun
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize sensitive information, raising concerns about potential misuse. LLM Unlearning, a post-hoc approach to remove this information from trained LLMs, offers a promising solution to mitigate these risks. However, previous practices face three key challenges: 1. Utility: successful unlearning often causes catastrophic collapse on unrelated tasks. 2. Efficiency: many methods either involve adding similarly sized models, which slows down unlearning or inference, or require retain data that are difficult to obtain. 3. Robustness: even effective methods may still leak data via extraction techniques. To address these challenges, we propose MEOW, a simple yet effective gradient descent-based unlearning method. Specifically, we use an offline LLM to generate a set of inverted facts. Then, we design a new metric, MEMO, to quantify memorization in LLMs. Finally, based on the signals provided by MEMO, we select the most appropriate set of inverted facts and finetune the model based on them. We evaluate MEOW on the commonly used unlearn benchmark, ToFU, with Llama2-7B-Chat and Phi-1.5B, and test it on both NLU and NLG tasks. Results demonstrate significant improvement of MEOW in forget quality without substantial loss in model utility. Meanwhile, MEOW does not exhibit significant degradation in NLU or NLG capabilities, and there is even a slight improvement in NLU performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_11844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MEOW: MEMOry Supervised LLM Unlearning Via Inverted Facts
Gu, Tianle
Huang, Kexin
Luo, Ruilin
Yao, Yuanqi
Yang, Yujiu
Teng, Yan
Wang, Yingchun
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize sensitive information, raising concerns about potential misuse. LLM Unlearning, a post-hoc approach to remove this information from trained LLMs, offers a promising solution to mitigate these risks. However, previous practices face three key challenges: 1. Utility: successful unlearning often causes catastrophic collapse on unrelated tasks. 2. Efficiency: many methods either involve adding similarly sized models, which slows down unlearning or inference, or require retain data that are difficult to obtain. 3. Robustness: even effective methods may still leak data via extraction techniques. To address these challenges, we propose MEOW, a simple yet effective gradient descent-based unlearning method. Specifically, we use an offline LLM to generate a set of inverted facts. Then, we design a new metric, MEMO, to quantify memorization in LLMs. Finally, based on the signals provided by MEMO, we select the most appropriate set of inverted facts and finetune the model based on them. We evaluate MEOW on the commonly used unlearn benchmark, ToFU, with Llama2-7B-Chat and Phi-1.5B, and test it on both NLU and NLG tasks. Results demonstrate significant improvement of MEOW in forget quality without substantial loss in model utility. Meanwhile, MEOW does not exhibit significant degradation in NLU or NLG capabilities, and there is even a slight improvement in NLU performance.
title MEOW: MEMOry Supervised LLM Unlearning Via Inverted Facts
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11844