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Machine Unlearning in Large Language Models (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on May 1, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A helper model flags conversations the AI should forget, then training pushes it away from bad replies and toward the average of good ones, so it unlearns harmful, false, or private answers. In tests, it stopped producing those replies while its normal abilities stayed intact.

Abstract

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a notable field, attracting significant attention for its ability to automatically generate intelligent contents for various application domains. However, LLMs still suffer from significant security and privacy issues. For example, LLMs might expose user privacy from hacking attacks or targeted prompts. To address this problem, this paper introduces a novel machine unlearning framework into LLMs. Our objectives are to make LLMs not produce harmful, hallucinatory, or privacy-compromising responses, while retaining their standard output capabilities. To accomplish this, we use an evaluative model to pinpoint dialogues needing unlearning. We also establish a distance loss to function as the model's negative loss, diverting it from previous undesirable outputs. Furthermore, we determine the expected output's cluster mean to formulate a positive loss, directing the model's outputs toward preferable outcomes without compromising its reasoning abilities and performance. Experimental results show that our approach effectively meets unlearning objectives without substantially compromising model performance.

Kongyang Chen, Zixin Wang, Bing Mi, Waixi Liu, Shaowei Wang, Xiaojun Ren, Jiaxing Shen
arXiv:2404.16841 · cs.CR · submitted Feb 3, 2024
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