Jingwen Pu University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Mingjun Shi, Xinrui Ren University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Yizhe Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Zhaokun Wang, Kun She University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit powerful capabilities but inevitably memorize sensitive information, raising privacy, copyright, and safety concerns. Existing LLM unlearning methods typically rely on updating model parameters. While effective, they are often limited in real-world scenarios: fine-tuning large-scale models is costly, may introduce potential irreversible risks, and depends on both forget and retain datasets, which are often difficult to obtain in full. To address these challenges, an ideal solution is to achieve unlearning at inference time. To this end, we propose SEGUE, a training-free, plug-and-play inference-time unlearning strategy. SEGUE employs a probe to detect queries involving forgettable concepts and applies entropy-guided decoding to suppress target knowledge, enabling controllable non-factual generation while preserving overall model capabilities. Experiments on the MUSE, RWKU, and WMDP datasets, covering copyright, entity, and potential-risk knowledge, show that SEGUE effectively balances sensitive knowledge suppression and generation quality, outperforming existing most inference-time unlearning methods.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
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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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jie Ou, Jinyu Guo University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Shiyao Guo, Yuang Li, Ruiqi Wu University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Zhaokun Wang, Wenyi Li, Wenhong Tian
Many-Shot In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, leveraging extensive examples to unlock the reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on a predetermined, fixed number of shots. This static approach often fails to adapt to the varying difficulty of different queries, leading to either insufficient context or interference from noise. Furthermore, the prohibitive computational and memory costs of long contexts severely limit Many-Shot’s feasibility. To address the above limitations, we propose AdapShot, which dynamically optimizes shot counts and leverages KV cache reuse for efficient inference. Specifically, we design a probe-based evaluation mechanism that utilizes output entropy to determine the optimal number of shots. To bypass the redundant prefilling computation during both the probing and inference phases, we incorporate a semantics-aware KV cache reuse strategy. Within this reuse strategy, to address positional encoding incompatibilities, we introduce a decoupling and re-encoding method that enables the flexible reordering of cached key-value pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdapShot achieves an average performance gain of \sim10% and a 4.64\times speedup compared to state-of-the-art DBSA.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表