Mitigating Memorization in Language Models

Mansi Sakarvadia, Aswathy Ajith, Arham Mushtaq Khan, Nathaniel C Hudson, Caleb Geniesse, Kyle Chard, Yaoqing Yang, Ian Foster, Michael W. Mahoney

Keywords: language models, memorization, machine unlearning, regularization, fine-tuning, natural language processing

TL;DR: We study memorization mitigation methods in LMs, introduce 5 new methods, and demonstrate that unlearning methods, particularly our method BalancedSubnet, are more effective than regularizer and fine-tuning approaches in removing memorization.

Abstract:

Language models (LMs) can “memorize” information, i.e., encode training data in their weights in such a way that inference-time queries can lead to verbatim regurgitation of that data. This ability to extract training data can be problematic, for example, when data are private or sensitive. In this work, we investigate methods to mitigate memorization: three regularizer-based, three fine-tuning-based, and eleven machine unlearning-based methods, with five of the latter being new methods that we introduce. We also introduce TinyMem, a suite of small, computationally-efficient LMs for the rapid development and evaluation of memorization-mitigation methods. We demonstrate that the mitigation methods that we develop using TinyMem can successfully be applied to production-grade LMs, and we determine via experiment that: regularizer-based mitigation methods are slow and ineffective at curbing memorization; fine-tuning-based methods
are effective at curbing memorization, but overly expensive, especially for retaining higher accuracies; and unlearning-based methods are faster and more effective, allowing for the precise localization and removal of memorized information from LM weights prior to inference. We show, in particular, that our proposed unlearning method BalancedSubnet outperforms other mitigation methods at removing
memorized information while preserving performance on target tasks.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 12369