Deep Contrastive Unlearning for Language Models

Abstract:The past a few years have witnessed the great success of large language models, demonstrating powerful capabilities in comprehending textual data and generating human-like languages. Large language models achieve success by being trained on vast amounts of textual data, including online sources with copyrighted content and user-generated knowledge. However, this comes at a cost: the potential risk of exposing users' privacy and violating copyright protections. Thus, to safeguard individuals' "right to be forgotten", there has been increasing interests in machine unlearning -- the process of removing information carried by particular training samples from a model while not deteriorating its predictive quality. This is a challenging task due to the black-box nature of language models. Most existing studies focus on mitigating the impact of those forgot samples upon a model's outputs, and do not explicitly consider the geometric distributions of samples in the latent space of a model. To address this issue, we propose a machine unlearning framework, named Deep Contrastive Unlearning for fine-Tuning (DeepCUT) language models. Our proposed model achieves machine unlearning by directly optimizing the latent space of a model. Comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DeepCUT with consistent and significant improvement over baseline methods.

The authors have withdrawn this manuscript because the work subsequently underwent substantial changes in scope, methodology, and/or conclusions, resulting in a materially different paper. To avoid potential confusion between the present manuscript and the subsequent peer-reviewed work, we withdraw this version

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2503.14900 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2503.14900v2 [cs.CL] for this version)