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Unlearning or Obfuscating? Jogging the Memory of Unlearned LLMs via Benign Relearning
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Machine unlearning is a promising approach to mitigate undesirable memorization of training data in ML models. However, in this work we show that existing approaches for unlearning in LLMs are surprisingly susceptible to a simple set of $\textit{benign relearning attacks}$. With access to only a small and potentially loosely related set of data, we find that we can ''jog'' the memory of unlearned models to reverse the effects of unlearning. For example, we show that relearning on public medical articles can lead an unlearned LLM to output harmful knowledge about bioweapons, and relearning general wiki information about the book series Harry Potter can force the model to output verbatim memorized text. We formalize this unlearning-relearning pipeline, explore the attack across three popular unlearning benchmarks, and discuss future directions and guidelines that result from our study. Our work indicates that current approximate unlearning methods simply suppress the model outputs and fail to robustly forget target knowledge in the LLMs.
Forward citations
Cited by 5 Pith papers
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Is your algorithm unlearning or untraining?
Machine unlearning conflates reversing the influence of specific training examples (untraining) with removing the full underlying distribution or behavior (unlearning).
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Probe-Geometry Alignment: Erasing the Cross-Sequence Memorization Signature Below Chance
Probe-geometry alignment erases cross-sequence memorization signatures in LLMs below chance using per-depth rank-one activation interventions with negligible impact on zero-shot capabilities.
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PrivUn: Unveiling Latent Ripple Effects and Shallow Forgetting in Privacy Unlearning
PrivUn shows privacy unlearning in LLMs produces gradient-driven ripple effects and only shallow forgetting across layers, with new strategies proposed for deeper removal.
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Representation-Guided Parameter-Efficient LLM Unlearning
REGLU guides LoRA-based unlearning via representation subspaces and orthogonal regularization to outperform prior methods on forget-retain trade-off in LLM benchmarks.
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Downgrade to Upgrade: Optimizer Simplification Enhances Robustness in LLM Unlearning
Downgrading optimizers to lower-information variants during LLM unlearning yields more robust forgetting on MUSE and WMDP benchmarks by converging to harder-to-perturb loss basins.
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