From Anchors to Supervision: Memory-Graph Guided Corpus-Free Unlearning for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Wenxuan, Zhang, Zhenfei, Zhang, Mi, Hong, Geng, Wen, Mi, You, Xiaoyu, Yang, Min
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Li, Wenxuan
Zhang, Zhenfei
Zhang, Mi
Hong, Geng
Wen, Mi
You, Xiaoyu
Yang, Min
author_facet Li, Wenxuan
Zhang, Zhenfei
Zhang, Mi
Hong, Geng
Wen, Mi
You, Xiaoyu
Yang, Min
contents Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising significant privacy and legal concerns. While machine unlearning has emerged as a potential remedy, prevailing paradigms rely on user-provided forget sets, making unlearning requests difficult to audit and exposing systems to secondary leakage and malicious abuse. We propose MAGE, a Memory-grAph Guided Erasure framework for user-minimized, corpus-free unlearning. Given only a lightweight user anchor that identifies a target entity, MAGE probes the target LLM to recover target-related memorization, organizes it into a weighted local memory graph, and synthesizes scoped supervision for unlearning. MAGE is model-agnostic, can be plugged into standard unlearning methods, and requires no access to the original training corpus. Experiments on two benchmarks, TOFU and RWKU, demonstrate that MAGE's self-generated supervision achieves effective unlearning performance comparable to supervision generated with external reference, while preserving overall utility. These results support a practical and auditable unlearning workflow driven by minimal anchors rather than user-supplied forget corpora.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_13777
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Anchors to Supervision: Memory-Graph Guided Corpus-Free Unlearning for Large Language Models
Li, Wenxuan
Zhang, Zhenfei
Zhang, Mi
Hong, Geng
Wen, Mi
You, Xiaoyu
Yang, Min
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising significant privacy and legal concerns. While machine unlearning has emerged as a potential remedy, prevailing paradigms rely on user-provided forget sets, making unlearning requests difficult to audit and exposing systems to secondary leakage and malicious abuse. We propose MAGE, a Memory-grAph Guided Erasure framework for user-minimized, corpus-free unlearning. Given only a lightweight user anchor that identifies a target entity, MAGE probes the target LLM to recover target-related memorization, organizes it into a weighted local memory graph, and synthesizes scoped supervision for unlearning. MAGE is model-agnostic, can be plugged into standard unlearning methods, and requires no access to the original training corpus. Experiments on two benchmarks, TOFU and RWKU, demonstrate that MAGE's self-generated supervision achieves effective unlearning performance comparable to supervision generated with external reference, while preserving overall utility. These results support a practical and auditable unlearning workflow driven by minimal anchors rather than user-supplied forget corpora.
title From Anchors to Supervision: Memory-Graph Guided Corpus-Free Unlearning for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13777