Rethinking Post-Unlearning Behavior of Large Vision-Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Kim, Minsung, Yang, Nakyeong, Jung, Kyomin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kim, Minsung
Yang, Nakyeong
Jung, Kyomin
author_facet Kim, Minsung
Yang, Nakyeong
Jung, Kyomin
contents Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can recognize individuals in images and disclose sensitive personal information about them, raising critical privacy concerns. Machine unlearning aims to remove such knowledge from the model. However, existing methods rarely prescribe what the model should output in place of the forgotten content, leading to Unlearning Aftermaths: degenerate, hallucinated, or excessively refused responses. We argue that, especially for generative LVLMs, it is crucial to consider the quality and informativeness of post-unlearning responses rather than relying solely on naive suppression. To address this, we introduce a new unlearning task for LVLMs that requires models to provide privacy-preserving yet informative and visually grounded responses. We also propose PUBG, a novel unlearning method that explicitly guides post-unlearning behavior toward a desirable output distribution. Experiments show that, while existing methods suffer from Unlearning Aftermaths despite successfully preventing privacy violations, PUBG effectively mitigates these issues, generating visually grounded and informative responses without privacy leakage for forgotten targets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02541
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Post-Unlearning Behavior of Large Vision-Language Models
Kim, Minsung
Yang, Nakyeong
Jung, Kyomin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can recognize individuals in images and disclose sensitive personal information about them, raising critical privacy concerns. Machine unlearning aims to remove such knowledge from the model. However, existing methods rarely prescribe what the model should output in place of the forgotten content, leading to Unlearning Aftermaths: degenerate, hallucinated, or excessively refused responses. We argue that, especially for generative LVLMs, it is crucial to consider the quality and informativeness of post-unlearning responses rather than relying solely on naive suppression. To address this, we introduce a new unlearning task for LVLMs that requires models to provide privacy-preserving yet informative and visually grounded responses. We also propose PUBG, a novel unlearning method that explicitly guides post-unlearning behavior toward a desirable output distribution. Experiments show that, while existing methods suffer from Unlearning Aftermaths despite successfully preventing privacy violations, PUBG effectively mitigates these issues, generating visually grounded and informative responses without privacy leakage for forgotten targets.
title Rethinking Post-Unlearning Behavior of Large Vision-Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02541