WAGLE: Strategic Weight Attribution for Effective and Modular Unlearning in Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17509v1
• Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2024 02:22:07 GMT
• Title: WAGLE: Strategic Weight Attribution for Effective and Modular Unlearning in Large Language Models
• Authors: Jinghan Jia, Jiancheng Liu, Yihua Zhang, Parikshit Ram, Nathalie Baracaldo, Sijia Liu,
• Abstract summary: This paper explores how model weights interact with unlearning processes in large language models (LLMs) We design the weight attribution-guided LLM unlearning method, WAGLE, which unveils the interconnections between 'influence' of weights and 'influence' of data to forget and retain.
• Score: 26.07431044262102
• License:
• Abstract: The need for effective unlearning mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly urgent, driven by the necessity to adhere to data regulations and foster ethical generative AI practices. Despite growing interest of LLM unlearning, much of the existing research has focused on varied unlearning method designs to boost effectiveness and efficiency. However, the inherent relationship between model weights and LLM unlearning has not been extensively examined. In this paper, we systematically explore how model weights interact with unlearning processes in LLMs and we design the weight attribution-guided LLM unlearning method, WAGLE, which unveils the interconnections between 'influence' of weights and 'influence' of data to forget and retain in LLM generation. By strategically guiding the LLM unlearning across different types of unlearning methods and tasks, WAGLE can erase the undesired content, while maintaining the performance of the original tasks. We refer to the weight attribution-guided LLM unlearning method as WAGLE, which unveils the interconnections between 'influence' of weights and 'influence' of data to forget and retain in LLM generation. Our extensive experiments show that WAGLE boosts unlearning performance across a range of LLM unlearning methods such as gradient difference and (negative) preference optimization, applications such as fictitious unlearning, malicious use prevention, and copyrighted information removal, and models including Zephyr-7b-beta and Llama2-7b. To the best of our knowledge, our work offers the first principled method for attributing and pinpointing the influential weights in enhancing LLM unlearning. It stands in contrast to previous methods that lack weight attribution and simpler weight attribution techniques.

Related papers

• From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning [153.8110509961261]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have been employed for generating entirely new data instances and providing more cost-effective annotations. This survey aims to serve as an up-to-date resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to gain an intuitive understanding of LLM-based AL techniques.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-02-17T12:58:17Z)
• ALU: Agentic LLM Unlearning [9.934258340998047]
  Information removal or suppression in large language models (LLMs) is a desired functionality, useful in AI regulation, legal compliance, safety, and privacy. Current LLM unlearning methods struggle to balance the unlearning efficacy and utility due to the competing nature of these objectives. We present the first agentic LLM unlearning (ALU) method, a multi-agent, retrain-free, model-agnostic approach to LLM unlearning.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-02-01T11:45:44Z)
• CoMMIT: Coordinated Instruction Tuning for Multimodal Large Language Models [68.64605538559312]
  In this paper, we analyze the MLLM instruction tuning from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Inspired by our findings, we propose a measurement to quantitatively evaluate the learning balance. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary loss regularization method to promote updating of the generation distribution of MLLMs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-29T23:18:55Z)
• SOUL: Unlocking the Power of Second-Order Optimization for LLM Unlearning [30.25610464801255]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the necessity of effective unlearning mechanisms to comply with data regulations and ethical AI practices. While interest in studying LLM unlearning is growing, the impact of the choice for LLM unlearning remains unexplored. We shed light on the significance of selection in LLM unlearning for the first time, establishing a clear connection between second-order optimization and influence unlearning.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-28T16:31:32Z)
• Offset Unlearning for Large Language Models [49.851093293780615]
  Unlearning has emerged as a potential remedy for Large Language Models affected by problematic training data. We propose $delta$-unlearning, an offset unlearning framework for black-box LLMs. Experiments demonstrate that $delta$-unlearning can effectively unlearn target data while maintaining similar or even stronger performance on general out-of-forget-scope tasks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-17T03:39:51Z)
• Rethinking Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models [85.92660644100582]
  We explore machine unlearning in the domain of large language models (LLMs) This initiative aims to eliminate undesirable data influence (e.g., sensitive or illegal information) and the associated model capabilities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-13T20:51:58Z)
• Knowledge Fusion of Large Language Models [73.28202188100646]
  This paper introduces the notion of knowledge fusion for large language models (LLMs) We externalize their collective knowledge and unique strengths, thereby elevating the capabilities of the target model beyond those of any individual source LLM. Our findings confirm that the fusion of LLMs can improve the performance of the target model across a range of capabilities such as reasoning, commonsense, and code generation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-19T05:02:46Z)
• Unlearn What You Want to Forget: Efficient Unlearning for LLMs [92.51670143929056]
  Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress from pre-training on and memorizing a wide range of textual data. This process might suffer from privacy issues and violations of data protection regulations. We propose an efficient unlearning framework that could efficiently update LLMs without having to retrain the whole model after data removals.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-31T03:35:59Z)

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.