PEBench: A Fictitious Dataset to Benchmark Machine Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Zhaopan, Zhou, Pengfei, Tang, Weidong, Ai, Jiaxin, Zhao, Wangbo, Wang, Kai, Peng, Xiaojiang, Shao, Wenqi, Yao, Hongxun, Zhang, Kaipeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Zhaopan
Zhou, Pengfei
Tang, Weidong
Ai, Jiaxin
Zhao, Wangbo
Wang, Kai
Peng, Xiaojiang
Shao, Wenqi
Yao, Hongxun
Zhang, Kaipeng
author_facet Xu, Zhaopan
Zhou, Pengfei
Tang, Weidong
Ai, Jiaxin
Zhao, Wangbo
Wang, Kai
Peng, Xiaojiang
Shao, Wenqi
Yao, Hongxun
Zhang, Kaipeng
contents Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks, but their reliance on vast, internet-sourced data raises significant privacy and security concerns. Machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical technique to address these issues, enabling the selective removal of targeted information from pre-trained models without costly retraining. However, the evaluation of MU for MLLMs remains inadequate. Existing benchmarks often lack a comprehensive scope, focusing narrowly on entities while overlooking the unlearning of broader visual concepts and the inherent semantic coupling between them. To bridge this gap, we introduce, PEBench, a novel benchmark designed to facilitate a thorough assessment of MU in MLLMs. PEBench features a fictitious dataset of personal entities and corresponding event scenes to evaluate unlearning across these distinct yet entangled concepts. We leverage this benchmark to evaluate five MU methods, revealing their unique strengths and weaknesses. Our findings show that unlearning one concept can unintentionally degrade performance on related concepts within the same image, a challenge we term cross-concept interference. Furthermore, we demonstrate the difficulty of unlearning person and event concepts simultaneously and propose an effective method to mitigate these conflicting objectives. The source code and benchmark are publicly available at https://pebench.github.io.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_12545
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PEBench: A Fictitious Dataset to Benchmark Machine Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models
Xu, Zhaopan
Zhou, Pengfei
Tang, Weidong
Ai, Jiaxin
Zhao, Wangbo
Wang, Kai
Peng, Xiaojiang
Shao, Wenqi
Yao, Hongxun
Zhang, Kaipeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks, but their reliance on vast, internet-sourced data raises significant privacy and security concerns. Machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical technique to address these issues, enabling the selective removal of targeted information from pre-trained models without costly retraining. However, the evaluation of MU for MLLMs remains inadequate. Existing benchmarks often lack a comprehensive scope, focusing narrowly on entities while overlooking the unlearning of broader visual concepts and the inherent semantic coupling between them. To bridge this gap, we introduce, PEBench, a novel benchmark designed to facilitate a thorough assessment of MU in MLLMs. PEBench features a fictitious dataset of personal entities and corresponding event scenes to evaluate unlearning across these distinct yet entangled concepts. We leverage this benchmark to evaluate five MU methods, revealing their unique strengths and weaknesses. Our findings show that unlearning one concept can unintentionally degrade performance on related concepts within the same image, a challenge we term cross-concept interference. Furthermore, we demonstrate the difficulty of unlearning person and event concepts simultaneously and propose an effective method to mitigate these conflicting objectives. The source code and benchmark are publicly available at https://pebench.github.io.
title PEBench: A Fictitious Dataset to Benchmark Machine Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12545