{"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/mmunlearner-reformulating-multimodal-machine","title":"MMUnlearner: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models","arxiv_id":"2502.11051","date":"2025-02-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jiahao Huo","Yibo Yan","Xu Zheng","Yuanhuiyi Lyu","Xin Zou","Zhihua Wei","Xuming Hu"],"abstract":"Recent progress in Machine Unlearning (MU) has introduced solutions for the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks. Nonetheless, MU for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains in its nascent phase. Therefore, we propose to reformulate the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs, which aims to erase only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge encoded within the original parameters of the language model backbone. Furthermore, we develop a novel geometry-constrained gradient ascent method MMUnlearner. It updates the weights of MLLMs with a weight saliency map jointly restricted by the remaining concepts and textual knowledge during unlearning, thereby preserving parameters essential for non-target knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMUnlearner surpasses baselines that finetuning MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions. Our code will be released upon acceptance.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11051v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11051v3.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":"mmunlearner-reformulating-multimodal-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/z1zs/mmunlearner","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"machine-unlearning","task_name":"Machine Unlearning"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2502.11051","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2502.11051"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/z1zs/mmunlearner","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"95e3810daa2e6652","entry":"find_all_linear_names","repo":"z1zs/mmunlearner","repo_kind":"official","path":"MLLMU_finetune.py","file_url":"https://github.com/z1zs/mmunlearner/blob/HEAD/MLLMU_finetune.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"95e3810daa2e6652"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}