Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Guoshenghui, Lin, Huawei, Zhao, Weijie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04457
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911686025281536
author Zhao, Guoshenghui
Lin, Huawei
Zhao, Weijie
author_facet Zhao, Guoshenghui
Lin, Huawei
Zhao, Weijie
contents Removing specific data influence from large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, as retraining is costly and existing approximate unlearning methods are often unstable. The challenge is exacerbated when the forget set is small or imbalanced. We introduce RapidUn, an influence-driven and parameter-efficient unlearning framework. It first estimates per-sample influence through a fast estimation module, then maps these scores into adaptive update weights that guide selective parameter updates -- forgetting harmful behavior while retaining general knowledge. On Mistral-7B and Llama-3-8B across Dolly-15k and Alpaca-57k, RapidUn achieves up to 100 times higher efficiency than full retraining and consistently outperforms Fisher, GA, and LoReUn on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution forgetting. These results establish influence-guided parameter reweighting as a scalable and interpretable paradigm for LLM unlearning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_04457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RapidUn: Influence-Driven Parameter Reweighting for Efficient Large Language Model Unlearning
Zhao, Guoshenghui
Lin, Huawei
Zhao, Weijie
Computation and Language
Removing specific data influence from large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, as retraining is costly and existing approximate unlearning methods are often unstable. The challenge is exacerbated when the forget set is small or imbalanced. We introduce RapidUn, an influence-driven and parameter-efficient unlearning framework. It first estimates per-sample influence through a fast estimation module, then maps these scores into adaptive update weights that guide selective parameter updates -- forgetting harmful behavior while retaining general knowledge. On Mistral-7B and Llama-3-8B across Dolly-15k and Alpaca-57k, RapidUn achieves up to 100 times higher efficiency than full retraining and consistently outperforms Fisher, GA, and LoReUn on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution forgetting. These results establish influence-guided parameter reweighting as a scalable and interpretable paradigm for LLM unlearning.
title RapidUn: Influence-Driven Parameter Reweighting for Efficient Large Language Model Unlearning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04457