Unified Parameter-Efficient Unlearning for LLMs

Published: 22 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 11 Mar 2025ICLR 2025 PosterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Large Language Model Unlearning; Machine Unlearning; Influence Function
Abstract: The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities across a variety of tasks. Fine-tuning these models for specific domains, particularly through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies like LoRA, has become a prevalent practice due to its efficiency. However, this raises significant privacy and security concerns, as models may inadvertently retain and disseminate sensitive or undesirable information. To address these issues, we introduce a novel instance-wise unlearning framework, LLMEraser, which systematically categorizes unlearning tasks and applies precise parameter adjustments using influence functions. Unlike traditional unlearning techniques that are often limited in scope and require extensive retraining, LLMEraser is designed to handle a broad spectrum of unlearning tasks without compromising model performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that LLMEraser excels in efficiently managing various unlearning scenarios while maintaining the overall integrity and efficacy of the models.
Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI
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Submission Number: 6232
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