LLM Unlearning via Loss Adjustment with Only Forget Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yaxuan, Wei, Jiaheng, Liu, Chris Yuhao, Pang, Jinlong, Liu, Quan, Shah, Ankit Parag, Bao, Yujia, Liu, Yang, Wei, Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wang, Yaxuan
Wei, Jiaheng
Liu, Chris Yuhao
Pang, Jinlong
Liu, Quan
Shah, Ankit Parag
Bao, Yujia
Liu, Yang
Wei, Wei
author_facet Wang, Yaxuan
Wei, Jiaheng
Liu, Chris Yuhao
Pang, Jinlong
Liu, Quan
Shah, Ankit Parag
Bao, Yujia
Liu, Yang
Wei, Wei
contents Unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for ensuring ethical and responsible AI use, especially in addressing privacy leak, bias, safety, and evolving regulations. Existing approaches to LLM unlearning often rely on retain data or a reference LLM, yet they struggle to adequately balance unlearning performance with overall model utility. This challenge arises because leveraging explicit retain data or implicit knowledge of retain data from a reference LLM to fine-tune the model tends to blur the boundaries between the forgotten and retain data, as different queries often elicit similar responses. In this work, we propose eliminating the need to retain data or the reference LLM for response calibration in LLM unlearning. Recognizing that directly applying gradient ascent on the forget data often leads to optimization instability and poor performance, our method guides the LLM on what not to respond to, and importantly, how to respond, based on the forget data. Hence, we introduce Forget data only Loss AjustmenT (FLAT), a "flat" loss adjustment approach which addresses these issues by maximizing f-divergence between the available template answer and the forget answer only w.r.t. the forget data. The variational form of the defined f-divergence theoretically provides a way of loss adjustment by assigning different importance weights for the learning w.r.t. template responses and the forgetting of responses subject to unlearning. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach not only achieves superior unlearning performance compared to existing methods but also minimizes the impact on the model's retained capabilities, ensuring high utility across diverse tasks, including copyrighted content unlearning on Harry Potter dataset and MUSE Benchmark, and entity unlearning on the TOFU dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_11143
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM Unlearning via Loss Adjustment with Only Forget Data
Wang, Yaxuan
Wei, Jiaheng
Liu, Chris Yuhao
Pang, Jinlong
Liu, Quan
Shah, Ankit Parag
Bao, Yujia
Liu, Yang
Wei, Wei
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for ensuring ethical and responsible AI use, especially in addressing privacy leak, bias, safety, and evolving regulations. Existing approaches to LLM unlearning often rely on retain data or a reference LLM, yet they struggle to adequately balance unlearning performance with overall model utility. This challenge arises because leveraging explicit retain data or implicit knowledge of retain data from a reference LLM to fine-tune the model tends to blur the boundaries between the forgotten and retain data, as different queries often elicit similar responses. In this work, we propose eliminating the need to retain data or the reference LLM for response calibration in LLM unlearning. Recognizing that directly applying gradient ascent on the forget data often leads to optimization instability and poor performance, our method guides the LLM on what not to respond to, and importantly, how to respond, based on the forget data. Hence, we introduce Forget data only Loss AjustmenT (FLAT), a "flat" loss adjustment approach which addresses these issues by maximizing f-divergence between the available template answer and the forget answer only w.r.t. the forget data. The variational form of the defined f-divergence theoretically provides a way of loss adjustment by assigning different importance weights for the learning w.r.t. template responses and the forgetting of responses subject to unlearning. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach not only achieves superior unlearning performance compared to existing methods but also minimizes the impact on the model's retained capabilities, ensuring high utility across diverse tasks, including copyrighted content unlearning on Harry Potter dataset and MUSE Benchmark, and entity unlearning on the TOFU dataset.
title LLM Unlearning via Loss Adjustment with Only Forget Data
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11143