让大模型忘记特定知识,同时保持其他能力并输出安全回答。
Null-Space Constrained Low-Rank Adaptation for Response-Specified Large Language Model Unlearning

- 用投影约束的低秩更新,只改无关紧要的部分,避免影响原有功能。
- 在TOFU数据集上遗忘效果提升32%,保留问答性能反而更好。
- 适合需要精准删除敏感信息又不破坏模型整体能力的场景。
大语言模型遗忘旨在抑制特定不良知识的同时保留良性能力。现有方法多聚焦于压制不良回答,而近期目标引导型方法虽指定替代行为,但对更新局部性仍缺乏约束。本文提出零空间约束的响应指定遗忘(NSRU),一种投影约束的低秩框架,用于可控的大模型遗忘。NSRU通过显式构造的安全响应模板,为每条需遗忘查询指定期望输出,同时抑制原始不良内容。为实现更新局部化,NSRU从良性隐藏表示中估计各模块保留子空间,并采用正交投影的低秩参数化,将LoRA更新限制在保留子空间的零空间内。优化目标联合考虑安全目标学习、不良响应抑制与保留能力维持。局部一阶分析表明,投影更新可减少保留侧扰动,同时保留可编辑方向以塑造遗忘查询行为。TOFU实验显示,NSRU有效抑制可提取的遗忘集知识,同时提升保留问答性能、模型效用与安全目标对齐度;在WMDP上,有害领域准确率接近随机水平,而广泛领域与邻近领域MMLU性能得以保留。消融实验证实了安全目标监督、不良响应抑制、保留损失与零空间投影更新的互补作用,敏感性与鲁棒性分析表明其在多种超参数与提示变化下表现稳定。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language model unlearning aims to suppress designated undesirable knowledge while preserving benign capabilities. Many unlearning objectives focus on suppressing undesired answers, while recent target-guided variants specify replacement behavior but still leave update locality largely unconstrained. This paper introduces \emph{Null-Space Constrained Response-Specified Unlearning} (NSRU), a projection-constrained low-rank framework for controlled LLM unlearning. NSRU uses an explicitly structured safe target response to specify the desired behavior for each forget query, while suppressing the original undesired content. To localize adaptation, NSRU estimates per-module retain subspaces from benign hidden representations and uses an orthogonal-projected low-rank parameterization to confine LoRA updates to the null space of the retain subspace. The resulting objective jointly optimizes safe-target learning, undesired-response suppression, and retention preservation under this constrained parameterization. We provide a local first-order analysis showing that the projected update reduces retain-side perturbations while preserving editable directions for shaping forget-query behavior. Experiments on TOFU show that NSRU effectively suppresses extractable forget-set knowledge while improving retain QA performance, model utility, and safe-target alignment over representative baselines. On WMDP, NSRU keeps hazardous-domain accuracy near the random-choice region while preserving broad and domain-adjacent MMLU utility. Ablation studies support the complementary roles of safe-target supervision, undesired-response suppression, retention loss, and null-space projected updates, while sensitivity and robustness analyses indicate stable behavior across the tested hyperparameter and prompt variations.
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