CAP: Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning in LLMs
Zhaokun Wang, Jinyu Guo University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Jingwen Pu University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Hongli Pu, Meng Yang, Xunlei Chen, Jie Ou, Wenyi Li 等 10 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) trained on unfiltered corpora inherently risk retaining sensitive information, necessitating selective knowledge unlearning for regulatory compliance and ethical safety. However, existing parameter-modifying methods face fundamental limitations: high computational costs, uncontrollable forgetting boundaries, and strict dependency on model weight access. These constraints render them impractical for closed-source models, yet current non-invasive alternatives remain unsystematic and reliant on empirical experience. To address these challenges, we propose the Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning (CAP) framework, an end-to-end prompt-driven unlearning paradigm. CAP decouples unlearning into a learnable prompt optimization process via reinforcement learning, where a prompt generator collaborates with the LLM to suppress target knowledge while preserving general capabilities selectively. This approach enables reversible knowledge restoration through prompt revocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAP achieves precise, controllable unlearning without updating model parameters, establishing a dynamic alignment mechanism that overcomes the transferability limitations of prior methods.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表