Preserving Utility in Continual LLM Unlearning via Orthogonal Projections
Juan Belieni, Ana Carolina Erthal, Eliezer de Souza da Silva, Diego Mesquita
AI 速览：提出Continual Orthogonal Projection（COP）梯度投影方案，将每次遗忘更新限制在先前遗忘集激活子空间的正交补中，以缓解顺序遗忘中的干扰与效用衰减。
Unlearning concerns the task of removing the influence of a sensitive portion of the training data, such as protected, copyrighted or private text, from a model without retraining it from scratch. While unlearning requests happen continuously during a model's lifetime, the vast majority of LLM unlearning methods are ill-suited for iterated removal, yielding steep decay in forgetting and utility upon sequential unlearning. This decay stems from interference between successive updates, as each new deletion can undo earlier ones or push the model further along directions already degraded by them. To address this, we introduce Continual Orthogonal Projection (COP), a gradient-projection scheme that restricts each update to the orthogonal complement of activation subspaces cached from prior forget sets. This approach provably guarantees first-order non-interference with earlier deletions. COP stores only a low-rank basis per layer, requiring neither past gradients nor previous forget sets, and plugs into unlearning methods that update the model through gradient steps on a differentiable loss without modifying its objective. Experiments on standard LLM unlearning benchmarks (TOFU and RWKU) show that COP preserves utility across sequential requests without weakening forgetting, preventing the collapse of standard objectives and forgetting more effectively than continual-specific baselines.
Pedro Dall'Antonia, Daniel Csillag, Diego Mesquita
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are models that learn to sample discrete objects proportional to a target reward. They are trained by minimizing balance errors over sampled trajectories, which inherently ties correctness to exploration: if a region is not visited, balance cannot be enforced there. Adaptive exploration is therefore crucial, yet standard training relies on a semi-gradient update that treats the sampling distribution as fixed at each optimization step. On the other hand, the full gradient reveals a second mechanism that reduces the observed errors in an anti-exploratory manner. In this paper, we establish a connection between the full gradient and min-min dynamics between the GFlowNet and a decoupled sampler, showing that the sampler reduces observed violations by avoiding high-error regions. This insight motivates a bridge between two-player games and single-policy dynamics, which underpins the design of our proposed method, Negative Reinforce Dynamics (NRD). By tying the parameters of an adversarial game together, we recover a single-policy dynamic that extends exploration while maintaining correctness. In standard benchmarks, our method outperforms existing approaches in both convergence speed and exploration efficiency, without training a separate teacher or auxiliary exploration policy.