提出持续遗忘方法CATA,解决视觉语言模型逐次删知识时效果差、易复现的问题。
CATA: Continual Machine Unlearning via Conflict-Averse Task Arithmetic

- 将每次删知识请求转为任务向量,用符号感知聚合避免更新冲突
- 在连续删除下遗忘效果提升23.6%,保留能力下降仅5.1%
- 适合需要长期安全合规的AI应用,如内容审核与隐私保护
视觉语言模型(VLMs)在对齐视觉与文本表征方面表现卓越,广泛应用于多模态场景。但其大规模训练数据引发隐私、版权及不当内容等担忧,亟需机器遗忘技术。现有研究多聚焦单次遗忘,而实际部署中常面临持续的知识删除请求,催生了持续机器遗忘的需求。本文首次系统研究VLMs的持续遗忘,识别出三大挑战:目标知识清除的有效性、保留模型能力的保真度、以及序列更新下知识不复现的持久性。为此,我们提出CATA方法,通过将每次遗忘请求表示为一个任务向量,并维护历史任务向量,采用符号感知的冲突规避聚合策略,抑制可能削弱已有遗忘效果的冲突更新分量。大量实验表明,在单次和持续设置下,CATA均显著优于基线,在遗忘效果、模型保真度和遗忘持久性上全面领先。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable ability in aligning visual and textual representations, enabling a wide range of multimodal applications. However, their large-scale training data inevitably raises concerns about privacy, copyright, and undesirable content, creating a strong need for machine unlearning. While existing studies mainly focus on single-shot unlearning, practical VLM deployment often involves sequential removal requests over time, giving rise to continual machine unlearning. In this work, we make the first attempt to study continual unlearning for VLMs and identify three key challenges in this setting: effectiveness in removing target knowledge, fidelity in preserving retained model utility, and persistence in preventing knowledge re-emergence under sequential updates. To address these challenges, we propose CATA, a conflict-averse task arithmetic method that represents each forget request as an unlearning task vector. By maintaining historical task vectors and performing sign-aware conflict-averse aggregation, CATA suppresses conflicting update components that may weaken previous forgetting effects. Extensive experiments under both single-shot and continual settings show that CATA outperforms baselines in terms of forgetting effectiveness, model fidelity, and forgetting persistence.
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