Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy and Research

A. Feder Cooper; Christopher A. Choquette-Choo; Miranda Bogen; Kevin Klyman; Matthew Jagielski; Katja Filippova; Ken Liu; Alexandra Chouldechova; Jamie Hayes; Yangsibo Huang; Eleni Triantafillou; Peter Kairouz; Nicole Elyse Mitchell; Niloofar Mireshghallah; Abigail Z. Jacobs; James Grimmelmann; Vitaly Shmatikov; Christopher De Sa; Ilia Shumailov; Andreas Terzis; Solon Barocas; Jennifer Wortman Vaughan; danah boyd; Yejin Choi; Sanmi Koyejo; Fernando Delgado; Percy Liang; Daniel E. Ho; Pamela Samuelson; Miles Brundage; David Bau; Seth Neel; Hanna Wallach; Amy B. Cyphert; Mark A. Lemley; Nicolas Papernot; Katherine Lee

arXiv · 2412.06966

Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy and Research

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

"Machine unlearning" is a popular proposed solution for mitigating the existence of content in an AI model that is problematic for legal or moral reasons, including privacy, copyright, safety, and more. For example, unlearning is often invoked as a solution for removing the effects of specific information from a generative-AI model's parameters, e.g., a particular individual's personal data or the inclusion of copyrighted content in the model's training data. Unlearning is also proposed as a way to prevent a model from generating targeted types of information in its outputs, e.g., generations that closely resemble a particular individual's data or reflect the concept of "Spiderman." Both of these goals--the targeted removal of information from a model and the targeted suppression of information from a model's outputs--present various technical and substantive challenges. We provide a framework for ML researchers and policymakers to think rigorously about these challenges, identifying several mismatches between the goals of unlearning and feasible implementations. These mismatches explain why unlearning is not a general-purpose solution for circumscribing generative-AI model behavior in service of broader positive impact.

Explore related subjects

cs.LG cs.AI cs.CY

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

A. Feder Cooper, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Miranda Bogen, Kevin Klyman, Matthew Jagielski, Katja Filippova, Ken Liu, Alexandra Chouldechova, Jamie Hayes, Yangsibo Huang, Eleni Triantafillou, Peter Kairouz, Nicole Elyse Mitchell, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Abigail Z. Jacobs, James Grimmelmann, Vitaly Shmatikov, Christopher De Sa, Ilia Shumailov, Andreas Terzis, Solon Barocas, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, danah boyd, Yejin Choi, Sanmi Koyejo, Fernando Delgado, Percy Liang, Daniel E. Ho, Pamela Samuelson, Miles Brundage, David Bau, Seth Neel, Hanna Wallach, Amy B. Cyphert, Mark A. Lemley, Nicolas Papernot, Katherine Lee. 2024-12-09. Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy and Research. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06966

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

AUC Maximization from Biased Positive-unlabeled Data with Confidence

Maximizing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is a standard approach to imbalanced binary classification. Although positive and negative data are required for maximizing the AUC, negative data are often difficult to collect in some real-world applications due to privacy concerns or the need for specialized expertise to annotate them. Thus, AUC maximization from positive and unlabeled (PU) data has been attracting attention. Existing methods assume that labeled positive data are unbiased samples from the true positive distribution. However, this ideal assumption is often violated in practice. In this paper, we propose a method to maximize the AUC from biased PU data. To address the bias, our key idea is to exploit {\it confidence}, i.e., the probability that an instance is positive, associated with the small number of labeled positive data. We derive an estimator of the AUC risk using biased PU data with confidence, enabling AUC maximization under such bias. We further show that the rewritten AUC risk induces a Bayes-optimal AUC ranking even when the available confidence is any strictly increasing transformation of the true posterior probability. We experimentally show the effectiveness of our method on eight real-world datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Measuring the Value of World-Model Updates: A Counterfactual Utility Protocol for Continual Adaptation

Continual world models must decide whether new data justify changing the model. Fixed replay schedules and prediction-error triggers specify when to update, but neither reveals the value of an individual update: one deployment run cannot show how the same model would have performed at that moment had it held its parameters. We introduce the fork ledger, which branches a deployment stream at pre-registered decision points into matched update and hold continuations under common random numbers. It evaluates both continuations on the same episodes and records $\Delta R = R_{\mathrm{update}} - R_{\mathrm{hold}}$. Always applying one fixed update mechanism lowers return on all three simulated control tasks: CartPole ($-144.0$; checkpoint-bootstrap $95\%$ CI $[-185.4,-116.1]$, against a converged return near $650$), Walker ($-82.8$; $[-101.1,-61.7]$) and Cheetah ($-18.6$; $[-29.0,-6.6]$). Divergence is an outcome of applying the update, so the estimand counts every attempted fork; restricted to the $693$ of $720$ that did not collapse, CartPole and Walker are unchanged in sign ($-113.4$ and $-82.1$) and Cheetah becomes unresolved ($-3.9$; $[-17.5,+13.0]$). The task is the unit of inference: each contributes $240$ attempted forks over five pretrained checkpoints crossed with two drift directions. The ledger makes counterfactual utility observable for a fixed mechanism, allowing triggers to be judged by the updates they select rather than by surprise detection alone.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

When More Is Not Better: Component Anti-Synergy in a P300 Speller

P300 brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers can provide hands-free communication for people with severe motor impairments. Modern pipelines combine multiple individually promising components, often assuming that 'more-is-better'. We tested this assumption using a four-component full-factorial experiment varying the inclusion of Euclidean Alignment (EA), xDAWN spatial filtering, subject calibration, and language model priors on a public P300 dataset. Performance was evaluated using accuracy, repetitions, and information transfer rate (ITR) with mixed-effects models. Results show that the value of components is conditional rather than additive. Calibration was the strongest singular contributor, while EA compensated for its absence in zero-calibration settings. Adding independently useful components could also reduce performance, revealing component anti-synergy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, LM support was not universally beneficial: its effect depends strongly on the strength of the underlying EEG pipeline, while results from a larger LM showed a similar pattern. Together, these findings challenge maximal 'all-on' pipeline design and highlight the value of selecting spatial and language-support components according to the quality of available EEG evidence.

cs.LG↗