无需目标数据即可清除多模态大模型中的敏感概念。
SPACE: Source-free Proxy Anchor Concept Erasure for MLLMs

- 用文本引导选择语义对齐的代理锚点,实现无源学习。
- 双约束机制在保留知识空间内优化锚点,性能下降低于5%。
- 适合隐私保护需求强的多模态模型去敏感化场景。
随着多模态大语言模型面临日益严峻的隐私风险与监管约束,机器遗忘(MU)成为移除敏感数据同时保持模型性能的关键解决方案。然而,现有方法通常依赖目标概念的视觉数据,而这类数据常因严格的数据保留政策无法获取,因而亟需无需原始数据的无源遗忘方法。本文提出首个专为多模态大模型设计的无源遗忘框架——源无关代理锚点概念擦除(SPACE)。SPACE包含两个阶段:(1) 文本引导代理锚点选择(TPAS),从共享特征空间中检索语义对齐的代理锚点;(2) 双约束语义隔离(DCSI),通过优化这些锚点间接擦除目标概念。DCSI将更新限制在保留知识的零空间内,确保结构完整性。我们理论上证明了SPACE严格控制对保留知识的扰动,并最大化特征谱熵,从而维持模型性能。大量实验在六个数据集上验证,SPACE性能接近当前最先进的依赖数据方法,证实其在无源遗忘场景下的有效性。代码将公开。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face growing privacy risks and regulatory constraints, machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a crucial solution for removing sensitive data while preserving model performance. However, existing MU methods typically rely on visual data of the target concepts, which is often unavailable due to strict data retention policies, thus creating a demand for source-free unlearning approaches that operate without access to the target data. In this work, we propose Source-free Proxy Anchor Concept Erasure (SPACE), the first source-free unlearning framework specialized for MLLMs. SPACE consists of two stages: (1) Text-Guided Proxy Anchor Selection (TPAS), which retrieves semantically aligned proxy anchors from the shared feature space. (2) Dual-Constraint Semantic Isolation (DCSI), which optimizes these anchors to indirectly erase target concepts. DCSI confines updates to the null space of retained knowledge, ensuring structural integrity. We theoretically prove that SPACE strictly bounds the perturbation on retained knowledge and maximizes feature spectral entropy, thereby maintaining the model's performance. Furthermore, extensive experiments across six datasets show that SPACE achieves performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art data-dependent methods, validating its effectiveness in source-free MU scenarios. The source code will be released.
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