用一致性约束的编辑方法,高效清除大模型中特定实体的知识。
Consistency-Aware Editing for Entity-level Unlearning in Language Models
- 通过多样提示聚合与一致性正则化,联合优化低秩更新
- 仅需数十个精心挑选提示,实现精准且鲁棒的遗忘
- 适合需要安全删除敏感实体信息的场景
大型语言模型可能保留训练数据中的敏感、版权或有害信息。实体级遗忘通过移除特定实体的所有知识来解决该问题,同时保持模型整体能力。现有方法通常依赖全模型微调或基于提示的干预,计算成本高或对改写查询脆弱。最近,模型编辑作为高效知识更新手段出现,为遗忘提供了新方向。但现有编辑技术多针对实例级更新,仅修改特定实体属性响应,而非彻底消除关联知识。本文提出一种新颖的一致性感知编辑(CAE)框架。CAE 聚合与目标实体相关的多样化提示,包括其属性、关系及对抗性改写句,并通过一致性正则化联合学习一个低秩更新,使不同提示下的编辑方向保持一致。这提升了遗忘的鲁棒性和全面性,同时最小化对无关知识的干扰。我们进一步探究了不同实体在模型中的存储位置,以及成功遗忘所需的最少多样化提示数量。在两个挑战性基准(RWKU 与 ToFU)上评估显示,CAE(i)揭示了实体知识在模型内部的表示与删除机制,(ii)显著优于传统遗忘与编辑基线,提升遗忘准确率与鲁棒性,(iii)仅用数十个精选提示即可实现可扩展的实体移除。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) risk retaining sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful information from their training data. Entity-level unlearning addresses this issue by removing all knowledge of a specific entity while preserving the model's overall capabilities. Existing approaches typically rely on full-model fine-tuning or prompt-based interventions, which can be computationally expensive or brittle when handling paraphrased queries. Recently, model editing has emerged as an efficient alternative for updating knowledge in LLMs, offering a promising direction for unlearning. However, existing editing techniques are typically designed for instance-level updates, modifying responses to specific attributes of an entity rather than eliminating all knowledge associated with the entity. In this paper, we investigate how editing techniques can be adapted for effective and efficient entity-level unlearning. To this end, we introduce a novel consistency-aware editing (CAE) framework. CAE aggregates a diverse set of prompts related to a target entity, including its attributes, relations, and adversarial paraphrases. It then jointly learns a low-rank update guided by a consistency regularizer that aligns the editing directions across prompts. This promotes robust and comprehensive forgetting while minimizing interference with unrelated knowledge. We further examine where different entities are stored within the model and how many diverse prompts are needed for successful unlearning. We evaluate CAE on two challenging benchmarks, RWKU and ToFU, and demonstrate that it (i) provides insights into how entity-level knowledge is internally represented and deleted in LLMs, (ii) significantly improves forgetting accuracy and robustness over traditional unlearning and editing baselines, and (iii) enables scalable entity removal using only tens of carefully selected prompts.
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