Toward Fine-Grained Forgetting:Attribute Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2608.01008v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can memorize and disclose sensitive information, motivating machine unlearning to remove designated knowledge while preserving model utility. Existing privacy-oriented benchmarks mainly study profile-level deletion, whereas practical requests often require finer-grained forgetting: removing a sensitive attribute while retaining other information about the same identity. We introduce attribute-level MLLM unlearning and construct AMU-Bench, covering long-text, numeric, and short-text targets, multiple forget ratios, and diverse question types. Our evaluation shows that target and retain attributes share identity-specific and visual evidence, making selective forgetting prone to residual leakage and collateral degradation. To address this challenge, we propose Causal Localization and Retain-Aware Projection (CLRP), a lightweight, training-free framework that localizes causally relevant layers and projects intermediate representations away from target-specific subspaces while preserving retain-related information. Experiments across MLLMs with different architectures and scales show that CLRP achieves a strong forgetting--retention trade-off on AMU-Bench. For example, at a 5% forget ratio, CLRP reduces Attribute Forget Set cloze accuracy from 20.00% to 4.00% while improving Attribute Retain Set accuracy from 14.77% to 17.79% in the reported LLaVA-1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-3B results. These findings demonstrate effective and selective attribute-level unlearning without modifying model parameters.

Related

• Towards Benign Memory Forgetting for Selective Multimodal Large Language Model Unlearning
• RePAIR: Interactive Machine Unlearning through Prompt-Aware Model Repair
• Mitigating Memorization In Language Models

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-10-15