{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-general-framework-to-enhance-fine-tuning","title":"A General Framework to Enhance Fine-tuning-based LLM Unlearning","arxiv_id":"2502.17823","date":"2025-02-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jie Ren","Zhenwei Dai","Xianfeng Tang","Jingying Zeng","Zhen Li","Rahul Goutam","Suhang Wang","Yue Xing","Qi He","Hui Liu"],"abstract":"Unlearning has been proposed to remove copyrighted and privacy-sensitive data from Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches primarily rely on fine-tuning-based methods, which can be categorized into gradient ascent-based (GA-based) and suppression-based methods. However, they often degrade model utility (the ability to respond to normal prompts). In this work, we aim to develop a general framework that enhances the utility of fine-tuning-based unlearning methods. To achieve this goal, we first investigate the common property between GA-based and suppression-based methods. We unveil that GA-based methods unlearn by distinguishing the target data (i.e., the data to be removed) and suppressing related generations, which is essentially the same strategy employed by suppression-based methods. Inspired by this finding, we introduce Gated Representation UNlearning (GRUN) which has two components: a soft gate function for distinguishing target data and a suppression module using Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT) to adjust representations rather than model parameters. Experiments show that GRUN significantly improves the unlearning and utility. Meanwhile, it is general for fine-tuning-based methods, efficient and promising for sequential unlearning.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17823v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17823v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-general-framework-to-enhance-fine-tuning","repo_url":"https://github.com/renjie3/GRUN","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2502.17823","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}