通过重放难例提升大模型遗忘效率,减少训练时间。
Replay What Matters: Off-Policy Replay for Efficient LLM Reinforcement Unlearning

- 用回放缓冲区重用难以遗忘的样本,避免重复低效采样。
- 在MUSE-Books数据集上保留质量从46.3提升至56.2。
- 适合需要高效精准遗忘的高难度场景,如敏感信息移除。
大模型遗忘技术为去除预训练模型中的有害知识提供了成本较低的替代方案,同时保持通用能力。现有基于强化学习的方法(如RULE)将遗忘任务建模为拒绝行为的学习,但其采用在线策略优化,反复从相同遗忘与保留提示中采样。我们发现这一过程存在关键低效:简单案例快速收敛,梯度信号微弱;而靠近遗忘/保留边界的难例持续产生低奖励轨迹,且仅使用一次即被丢弃。为此,我们提出ReRULE,一种面向强化遗忘的离线回放增强方法。ReRULE在早期GRPO训练阶段将低奖励难例轨迹组存入回放缓冲区,并在后续阶段通过重要性采样实现离线策略更新,引导计算聚焦仍需学习的边界案例。理论上,ReRULE比纯在线策略的RULE具有更紧的难例收敛界。实验表明,ReRULE将MUSE-Books保留质量从46.3提升至56.2,仅增加5%~11%训练时间。其在更简单的TOFU设置上改善有限,进一步验证了该方法在难易差异显著时效果更优的设计初衷。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility. Recent RL-based methods such as RULE reformulate unlearning as learning a refusal behavior, but their on-policy optimization repeatedly samples from the same forget and retain/boundary prompts throughout training. We identify a critical inefficiency in this process: easy cases quickly converge and provide little useful gradient signal, while hard cases near the forget/retain boundary continue to produce low-reward rollouts that are discarded after a single use. To address this issue, we propose ReRULE, an off-policy replay enhancement for reinforcement unlearning. ReRULE stores low-reward hard-case rollout groups in a replay buffer during early GRPO training and reuses them in later stages through importance-sampled off-policy updates, redirecting computation toward boundary cases that still require learning. Theoretically, we show that ReRULE yields a tighter hard-case convergence bound than pure on-policy RULE. Empirically, ReRULE improves MUSE-Books Retain Quality from 46.3 to 56.2 while adding only 5--11% training time across benchmarks. Its limited improvement on the simpler TOFU setting further supports the intended conditional behavior: replay is most beneficial when the hard/easy disparity is pronounced.
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