Yingxu Li


2025

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Human-Inspired Obfuscation for Model Unlearning: Local and Global Strategies with Hyperbolic Representations
Zekun Wang | Jingjie Zeng | Yingxu Li | Liang Yang | Hongfei Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across various domains, largely due to training on massive datasets. However, this also raises growing concerns over the exposure of sensitive and private information, making model unlearning increasingly critical.However, existing methods often struggle to balance effective forgetting with maintaining model utility. In this work, we propose HyperUnlearn, a human-inspired unlearning framework. We construct two types of fuzzy data—local and global—to simulate forgetting, and represent them in hyperbolic and Euclidean spaces, respectively. Unlearning is performed on a model with frozen early layers to isolate forgetting and preserve useful knowledge.Experiments demonstrate that HyperUnlearn effectively forgets sensitive content while maintaining the model’s language understanding, fluency, and benchmark performance, offering a practical trade-off between forgetting and capability preservation.

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DUTir at SemEval-2025 Task 4: Optimized Fine-Tuning of Linear Layers for Balanced Knowledge Forgetting and Retention
Zekun Wang | Jingjie Zeng | Yingxu Li | Liang Yang | Hongfei Lin
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)

This paper describes our system used in SemEval-2025 Task 4: Unlearning sensitive content from Large Language Models. In this work, we propose a method for controlling the fine-tuning of a model’s linear layers, referred to as CTL-Finetune (Control-Tuned Linear Fine-tuning). The goal of our method is to allow the model to forget specific information while preserving the knowledge it needs to retain. The method consists of four main components: 1) shuffling data labels, 2) shuffling label gradient calculation, 3) determination of control layers, and 4) fine-tuning using a combination of gradient ascent and gradient descent. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively enables the model to forget targeted knowledge while minimizing the impact on retained information, thus maintaining the model’s overall performance.