To Forget or Not? Towards Practical Knowledge Unlearning for Large Language Models

Bozhong Tian, Xiaozhuan Liang, Siyuan Cheng, Qingbin Liu, mengruwang, Dianbo Sui, Xi Chen, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang

To Forget or Not? Towards Practical Knowledge Unlearning for Large Language Models: 15 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #8 of 12 papers on 2024-07-03. Day-by-day upvote history.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive corpora inevitably retain sensitive data, such as personal privacy information and copyrighted material. Recent advancements in knowledge unlearning involve updating LLM parameters to erase specific knowledge. However, current unlearning paradigms are mired in vague forgetting boundaries, often erasing knowledge indiscriminately. In this work, we introduce KnowUnDo, a benchmark containing copyrighted content and user privacy domains to evaluate if the unlearning process inadvertently erases essential knowledge. Our findings indicate that existing unlearning methods often suffer from excessive unlearning. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, MemFlex, which utilizes gradient information to precisely target and unlearn sensitive parameters. Experimental results show that MemFlex is superior to existing methods in both precise knowledge unlearning and general knowledge retaining of LLMs. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowUnDo.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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