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Unlearning vs. Obfuscation: Are We Truly Removing Knowledge?

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Guangzhi Sun, Potsawee Manakul, Xiao Zhan, Mark Gales

Outline

This paper addresses unlearning, an emerging technology for supporting data privacy, regulatory compliance, and ethical AI deployment in large-scale language models (LLMs). Recent techniques often rely on obfuscation, which suppresses knowledge by injecting incorrect or irrelevant information. This approach, however, often adds knowledge rather than removes it, leaving the model vulnerable to scrutiny. This paper formally distinguishes between unlearning and obfuscation and presents a scrutiny-based evaluation framework to assess whether existing approaches truly remove target information. Furthermore, we propose DF-MCQ, a novel unlearning method that effectively removes knowledge about target individuals by flattening the model's prediction distribution for automatically generated multiple-choice questions using KL-divergence, thereby inducing appropriate rejection behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that DF-MCQ achieves a rejection rate of over 90% and achieves unlearning with a level of uncertainty significantly higher than that achieved by random selection.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways: DF-MCQ overcomes the limitations of existing concealment-based unlearning techniques and presents an effective unlearning method that effectively removes target information. It achieves a high rejection rate of over 90% and high uncertainty, contributing to data privacy and ethical AI deployment. Furthermore, the proposed research-based evaluation framework can serve as a useful tool for objectively evaluating the performance of unlearning techniques.
Limitations: The performance of DF-MCQ was evaluated on a specific dataset and model, and its generalization performance on other datasets and models requires further research. Further analysis is needed on the computational cost and efficiency of distribution flattening using KL-divergence. Furthermore, the quality and diversity of automatically generated multiple-choice questions can affect unlearning performance, so improvements in question generation strategies may be necessary.
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