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Machine Unlearning in Generative AI: A Survey (arxiv.org)
1 point by tzury on Jul 31, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Generative models memorize sensitive or harmful facts from web scrapes, so people want to make them forget without retraining from scratch. This survey organizes those unlearning techniques for text and image generators, covering how to define the problem, test forgetting, and where each falls short.

Abstract

Generative AI technologies have been deployed in many places, such as (multimodal) large language models and vision generative models. Their remarkable performance should be attributed to massive training data and emergent reasoning abilities. However, the models would memorize and generate sensitive, biased, or dangerous information originated from the training data especially those from web crawl. New machine unlearning (MU) techniques are being developed to reduce or eliminate undesirable knowledge and its effects from the models, because those that were designed for traditional classification tasks could not be applied for Generative AI. We offer a comprehensive survey on many things about MU in Generative AI, such as a new problem formulation, evaluation methods, and a structured discussion on the advantages and limitations of different kinds of MU techniques. It also presents several critical challenges and promising directions in MU research. A curated list of readings can be found: https://github.com/franciscoliu/GenAI-MU-Reading.

Zheyuan Liu, Guangyao Dou, Zhaoxuan Tan, Yijun Tian, Meng Jiang
arXiv:2407.20516 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Jul 30, 2024
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