Towards Safer Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning
Zheyuan Liu Guangyao Dou Zhaoxuan Tan Yijun Tian Meng Jiang
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated their
vast potential across various domains, attributed to their extensive
pretraining knowledge and exceptional generalizability. However, LLMs often
encounter challenges in generating harmful content when faced with problematic
prompts. To address this problem, existing work attempted to implement a
gradient ascent based approach to prevent LLMs from producing harmful output.
While these methods can be effective, they frequently impact the model utility
in responding to normal prompts. To address this gap, we introduce Selective
Knowledge negation Unlearning (SKU), a novel unlearning framework for LLMs,
designed to eliminate harmful knowledge while preserving utility on normal
prompts. Specifically, SKU is consisted of two stages: harmful knowledge
acquisition stage and knowledge negation stage. The first stage aims to
identify and acquire harmful knowledge within the model, whereas the second is
dedicated to remove this knowledge. SKU selectively isolates and removes
harmful knowledge in model parameters, ensuring the model's performance remains
robust on normal prompts. Our experiments conducted across various LLM
architectures demonstrate that SKU identifies a good balance point between
removing harmful information and preserving utility.