Multilingual Unlearning in LLMs: Transfer, Dynamics, and Reversibility

Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) can memorize sensitive facts, motivating unlearning methods that remove targeted knowledge without costly retraining. However, unlearning research remains heavily English-centric. We study multilingual unlearning by extending the TOFU benchmark to five languages, and fine-tune, unlearn, and query our models with different permutations of languages. We find that unlearning transfer, the ability of an unlearned model to "forget" facts in languages other than the unlearning language, is highly variable: e.g., it is strongest between languages sharing scripts and families, and we show that the unlearning language predicts which query languages are most likely to yield the strongest transfer. Layer-wise analysis reveals that unlearning leaves the shared cross-lingual latent space largely intact in early layers, instead operating primarily in later decoding layers. This suggests that unlearning does not truly erase knowledge, but rather induces superficial suppression. Exploiting this structure, a single inference-time steering direction reverses much of this suppression across languages, recovering 50% (Qwen) and 90% (Gemma) of the unlearned knowledge.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2606.03291 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.03291v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.03291 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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