Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models

Pretrained Language Models (LMs) memorize a vast amount of knowledge during initial pretraining, including information that may violate the privacy of personal lives and identities. Previous work addressing privacy issues for language models has mostly focused on data preprocessing and differential privacy methods, both requiring re-training the underlying LM. We propose knowledge unlearning as an alternative method to reduce privacy risks for LMs post hoc. We show that simply applying the unlikelihood training objective to target token sequences is effective at forgetting them with little to no degradation of general language modeling performances; it sometimes even substantially improves the underlying LM with just a few iterations. We also find that sequential unlearning is better than trying to unlearn all the data at once and that unlearning is highly dependent on which kind of data (domain) is forgotten. By showing comparisons with a previous data preprocessing method known to mitigate privacy risks for LMs, we show that unlearning can give a stronger empirical privacy guarantee in scenarios where the data vulnerable to extraction attacks are known a priori while being orders of magnitude more computationally efficient. We release the code and dataset needed to replicate our results at https://github.com/joeljang/knowledge-unlearning

Reviews

C.S. Lewis. Catherine Swift. Reviewed by Nancy-Lou Patterson. The Tolkien Family Album. John and Priscilla Tolkien. Reviewed by Glen GoodKnight. Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time. James Gurney. Reviewed by Glen GoodKnight. The Golden Thread: Essays on George MacDonald. Walter Raeper. Reviewed by Nancy-Lou Patterson. J.R.R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle-earth. Daniel Grotta. Reviewed by Glen GoodKnight. Fish Soup. Ursula K. Le Guin. Reviewed by Nancy-Lou Patterson

Our Mythical Hope

Classical Antiquity is a particularly important field in terms of “Hope studies” […]. For centuries, the ancient tradition, and classical mythology in particular, has been a common reference point for whole hosts of creators of culture, across many parts of the world, and with the new media and globalization only increasing its impact. Thus, in our research at this stage, we have decided to study how the authors of literary and audiovisual texts for youth make use of the ancient myths to support their young protagonists (and readers or viewers) in crucial moments of their existence, on their road into adulthood, and in those dark hours when it seems that life is about to shatter and fade away. However, if Hope is summoned in time, the crisis can be overcome and the protagonist grows stronger, with a powerful uplifting message for the public. […] Owing to this, we get a chance to remain true to our ideas, to keep faith in our dreams, and, when the decisive moment comes, to choose not hatred but love, not darkness but light. Katarzyna Marciniak, University of Warsaw, From the introductory chapte

L'efecte viatge. Representació del paisatge: entre persona i escenari

Treballs Finals de Grau de Belles Arts. Facultat de Belles Arts. Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2014-2015, Tutor: Luis F. Ortega[cat] Ens trobem en l’era digital, sent consumidors actius (alhora que productors) d’un gran munt d’imatges, fet que ens fa coneixedors d’altres llocs del món en els que no em estat; a la vegada, produccions com pel·lícules i animacions ens permeten viatjar per llocs als quals mai podríem anar presencialment. Aquest treball tracta d’una reflexió personal de l’evolució en la representació paisatgística del viatge compresa des del descobriment d’Amèrica fins a l’actualitat, tractant-ho a través dels diaris de viatge, el dibuix i la pintura, considerant tant les avantatges de la representació gràfica i la utilitat de les digitals per la creació d’espais ficticis.[eng] In this actual digital era, we are being active consumers (while being producers) of a great amount of images, which give us the sense we know places in the world that we have never been at; meanwhile, productions like movies or animations let us travel to places where we could never get to be in person. This work focuses on a personal reflection about the evolution of landscape’s representation during a journey comprising from the American discovery to the present, through travel journals, sketches and paintings, considering the advantages of graphic representation and the usefulness of the digital ones in order to create fictitious spaces