Cross-Lingual Unlearning of Selective Knowledge in Multilingual Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12354v2
• Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2024 05:09:53 GMT
• Title: Cross-Lingual Unlearning of Selective Knowledge in Multilingual Language Models
• Authors: Minseok Choi, Kyunghyun Min, Jaegul Choo,
• Abstract summary: Pretrained language models memorize vast amounts of information, including private and copyrighted data, raising significant safety concerns. Retraining these models after excluding sensitive data is prohibitively expensive, making machine unlearning a viable, cost-effective alternative. This paper presents a pioneering approach to machine unlearning for multilingual language models, selectively erasing information across different languages while maintaining overall performance.
• Score: 38.10962690551031
• License:
• Abstract: Pretrained language models memorize vast amounts of information, including private and copyrighted data, raising significant safety concerns. Retraining these models after excluding sensitive data is prohibitively expensive, making machine unlearning a viable, cost-effective alternative. Previous research has focused on machine unlearning for monolingual models, but we find that unlearning in one language does not necessarily transfer to others. This vulnerability makes models susceptible to low-resource language attacks, where sensitive information remains accessible in less dominant languages. This paper presents a pioneering approach to machine unlearning for multilingual language models, selectively erasing information across different languages while maintaining overall performance. Specifically, our method employs an adaptive unlearning scheme that assigns language-dependent weights to address different language performances of multilingual language models. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework compared to existing unlearning baselines, setting a new standard for secure and adaptable multilingual language models.

Related papers

• LlamaTurk: Adapting Open-Source Generative Large Language Models for Low-Resource Language [2.9914612342004503]
  This study explores an alternative solution by adapting large language models, primarily trained on English, to low-resource languages. We assess various strategies, including continual training, instruction fine-tuning, task-specific fine-tuning, and vocabulary extension. The results show that continual training improves language comprehension, as reflected in perplexity scores, and task-specific tuning generally enhances performance of downstream tasks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-13T13:41:59Z)
• ColBERT-XM: A Modular Multi-Vector Representation Model for Zero-Shot Multilingual Information Retrieval [10.664434993386523]
  Current approaches circumvent the lack of high-quality labeled data in non-English languages. We present a novel modular dense retrieval model that learns from the rich data of a single high-resource language.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-23T02:21:24Z)
• Soft Language Clustering for Multilingual Model Pre-training [57.18058739931463]
  We propose XLM-P, which contextually retrieves prompts as flexible guidance for encoding instances conditionally. Our XLM-P enables (1) lightweight modeling of language-invariant and language-specific knowledge across languages, and (2) easy integration with other multilingual pre-training methods.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-13T08:08:08Z)
• Adapting Multilingual Speech Representation Model for a New, Underresourced Language through Multilingual Fine-tuning and Continued Pretraining [2.3513645401551333]
  We investigate the possibility for adapting an existing multilingual wav2vec 2.0 model for a new language. Our results show that continued pretraining is the most effective method to adapt a wav2vec 2.0 model for a new language. We find that if a model pretrained on a related speech variety or an unrelated language with similar phonological characteristics is available, multilingual fine-tuning using additional data from that language can have positive impact on speech recognition performance.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-01-18T03:57:53Z)
• Lifting the Curse of Multilinguality by Pre-training Modular Transformers [72.46919537293068]
  multilingual pre-trained models suffer from the curse of multilinguality, which causes per-language performance to drop as they cover more languages. We introduce language-specific modules, which allows us to grow the total capacity of the model, while keeping the total number of trainable parameters per language constant. Our approach enables adding languages post-hoc with no measurable drop in performance, no longer limiting the model usage to the set of pre-trained languages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-05-12T17:59:56Z)
• Towards Zero-shot Language Modeling [90.80124496312274]
  We construct a neural model that is inductively biased towards learning human languages. We infer this distribution from a sample of typologically diverse training languages. We harness additional language-specific side information as distant supervision for held-out languages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-08-06T23:49:18Z)
• UNKs Everywhere: Adapting Multilingual Language Models to New Scripts [103.79021395138423]
  Massively multilingual language models such as multilingual BERT (mBERT) and XLM-R offer state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer performance on a range of NLP tasks. Due to their limited capacity and large differences in pretraining data, there is a profound performance gap between resource-rich and resource-poor target languages. We propose novel data-efficient methods that enable quick and effective adaptation of pretrained multilingual models to such low-resource languages and unseen scripts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-31T11:37:28Z)
• Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension with Language Branch Knowledge Distillation [105.41167108465085]
  Cross-lingual Machine Reading (CLMRC) remains a challenging problem due to the lack of large-scale datasets in low-source languages. We propose a novel augmentation approach named Language Branch Machine Reading (LBMRC) LBMRC trains multiple machine reading comprehension (MRC) models proficient in individual language. We devise a multilingual distillation approach to amalgamate knowledge from multiple language branch models to a single model for all target languages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-27T13:12:17Z)
• When Being Unseen from mBERT is just the Beginning: Handling New Languages With Multilingual Language Models [2.457872341625575]
  Transfer learning based on pretraining language models on a large amount of raw data has become a new norm to reach state-of-the-art performance in NLP. We show that such models behave in multiple ways on unseen languages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-24T10:15:03Z)
• Comparison of Interactive Knowledge Base Spelling Correction Models for Low-Resource Languages [81.90356787324481]
  Spelling normalization for low resource languages is a challenging task because the patterns are hard to predict. This work shows a comparison of a neural model and character language models with varying amounts on target language data. Our usage scenario is interactive correction with nearly zero amounts of training examples, improving models as more data is collected.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-20T17:31:07Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.