Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Yue, Wang, Qizhou, Liu, Feng, Huang, Wei, Du, Yali, Du, Xiaojiang, Han, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09117
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913876304461824
author Wang, Yue
Wang, Qizhou
Liu, Feng
Huang, Wei
Du, Yali
Du, Xiaojiang
Han, Bo
author_facet Wang, Yue
Wang, Qizhou
Liu, Feng
Huang, Wei
Du, Yali
Du, Xiaojiang
Han, Bo
contents Large language model (LLM) unlearning has demonstrated its essential role in removing privacy and copyright-related responses, crucial for their legal and safe applications. However, the pursuit of complete unlearning often comes with substantial costs due to its compromises in their general functionality, leading to a notorious trade-off between unlearning and retention. It motivates this paper to explore enhanced unlearning schemes that can mitigate this trade-off. Specifically, we propose Gradient Rectified Unlearning (GRU), an improved framework that regulates the directions of gradient updates during the unlearning procedure such that their side impacts on other, unrelated responses can be minimized. GRU is easy and general to implement, demonstrating practical effectiveness across a variety of well-established unlearning benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09117
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GRU: Mitigating the Trade-off between Unlearning and Retention for LLMs
Wang, Yue
Wang, Qizhou
Liu, Feng
Huang, Wei
Du, Yali
Du, Xiaojiang
Han, Bo
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Large language model (LLM) unlearning has demonstrated its essential role in removing privacy and copyright-related responses, crucial for their legal and safe applications. However, the pursuit of complete unlearning often comes with substantial costs due to its compromises in their general functionality, leading to a notorious trade-off between unlearning and retention. It motivates this paper to explore enhanced unlearning schemes that can mitigate this trade-off. Specifically, we propose Gradient Rectified Unlearning (GRU), an improved framework that regulates the directions of gradient updates during the unlearning procedure such that their side impacts on other, unrelated responses can be minimized. GRU is easy and general to implement, demonstrating practical effectiveness across a variety of well-established unlearning benchmarks.
title GRU: Mitigating the Trade-off between Unlearning and Retention for LLMs
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09117