2025
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A Fully Probabilistic Perspective on Large Language Model Unlearning: Evaluation and Optimization
Anda Cheng
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Wei Huang
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Yinggui Wang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Model Unlearning (LLMU) is a promising way to remove private or sensitive information from large language models. However, the comprehensive evaluation of LLMU remains underexplored. The dominant deterministic evaluation can yield overly optimistic assessments of unlearning efficacy. To mitigate this, we propose a Fully Probabilistic Evaluation (FPE) framework that incorporates input and output distributions in LLMU evaluation. FPE obtains a probabilistic evaluation result by querying unlearned models with various semantically similar inputs and multiple sampling attempts. We introduce an Input Distribution Sampling method in FPE to select high-quality inputs, enabling a stricter measure of information leakage risks. Furthermore, we introduce a Contrastive Embedding Loss (CEL) to advance the performance of LLMU. CEL employs contrastive learning to distance latent representations of unlearned samples from adaptively clustered contrast samples while aligning them with random vectors, leading to improved efficacy and robustness for LLMU. Our experiments show that FPE uncovers more unlearned information leakage risks than prior evaluation methods, and CEL improves unlearning effectiveness by at least 50.1% and robustness by at least 37.2% on Llama-2-7B while retaining high model utility.
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Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models with Forgetting-aware Pruning
Wei Huang
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Anda Cheng
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Yinggui Wang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in various downstream tasks but typically face Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) during fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose the Forgetting-Aware Pruning Metric (FAPM), a novel pruning-based approach to balance CF and downstream task performance. Our investigation reveals that the degree to which task vectors (i.e., the subtraction of pre-trained weights from the weights fine-tuned on downstream tasks) overlap with pre-trained model parameters is a critical factor for CF. Based on this finding, FAPM employs the ratio of the task vector to pre-trained model parameters as a metric to quantify CF, integrating this measure into the pruning criteria. Importantly, FAPM does not necessitate modifications to the training process or model architecture, nor does it require any auxiliary data. We conducted extensive experiments across eight datasets, covering natural language inference, General Q&A, Medical Q&A, Math Q&A, reading comprehension, and cloze tests. The results demonstrate that FAPM limits CF to just 0.25% while maintaining 99.67% accuracy on downstream tasks. We provide the codes of FAPM at an anonymous repository(https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FAPM-65CF).
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DPF-CM: A Data Processing Framework with Privacy-Preserving Vector Databases for Chinese Medical LLMs Training and Deployment
Wei Huang
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Anda Cheng
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Zhao Zhang
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Yinggui Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Current open-source training pipelines for Chinese medical language models predominantly emphasize optimizing training methodologies to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs), yet lack comprehensive exploration into training data processing. To address this gap, we propose DPF-CM, a holistic Data Processing Framework for Chinese Medical LLMs training and deployment. DPF-CM comprises two core modules. The first module is a data processing pipeline tailored for model training. Beyond standard data processing operations, we (1) introduce a chained examples context-learning strategy to generate question-oriented instructions to mitigate the lack of instruction content, and (2) implement an ensemble-based filtering mechanism for preference data curation that averages multiple reward models to suppress noisy samples. The second module focuses on privacy preservation during model deployment. To prevent privacy risks from the inadvertent exposure of training data, we propose a Privacy Preserving Vector Database (PPVD) approach, which involves model memory search, high-risk database construction, secure database construction, and match-and-replace, four key stages to minimize privacy leakage during inference collectively. Experimental results show that DPF-CM significantly improves model accuracy, enabling our trained Chinese medical LLM to achieve state-of-the-art performance among open-source counterparts. Moreover, the framework reduces training data privacy leakage by 27%.
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DaMoC: Efficiently Selecting the Optimal Large Language Model for Fine-tuning Domain Tasks Based on Data and Model Compression
Wei Huang
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Huang Wei
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Yinggui Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large language models (LLMs) excel in general tasks but struggle with domain-specific ones, requiring fine-tuning with specific data. With many open-source LLMs available, selecting the best model for fine-tuning downstream tasks is challenging, primarily focusing on how to quickly identify the optimal LLM. We introduce a Data and Model Compression Framework (DaMoC) that addresses this challenge by: 1) Data Level: A systematic categorization of data filtering methodologies for LLMs is first established, classifying them into three distinct paradigms: (1) distribution-aware methods, (2) quality-aware methods, and (3) hybrid approaches considering both dimensions. Further, we enhance the density of key tokens in the text achieving token compression. Subsequently, we use an LLM to iterative rewrite the text to optimize its expression. 2) Model Level: We use layer similarity scores to assess each layer’s importance and remove those with lower importance. Then, we introduce a sparse merging paradigm to preserve as much of the original model’s capability as possible. Extensive experiments on four datasets, medical Q&A, financial Q&A, general Q&A, and reading comprehension, show that we can select the optimal LLM while saving approximately 20-fold in training time.
2024
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Privacy Evaluation Benchmarks for NLP Models
Wei Huang
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Yinggui Wang
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Cen Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
By inducing privacy attacks on NLP models, attackers can obtain sensitive information such as training data and model parameters, etc. Although researchers have studied, in-depth, several kinds of attacks in NLP models, they are non-systematic analyses. It lacks a comprehensive understanding of the impact caused by the attacks. For example, we must consider which scenarios can apply to which attacks, what the common factors are that affect the performance of different attacks, the nature of the relationships between different attacks, and the influence of various datasets and models on the effectiveness of the attacks, etc. Therefore, we need a benchmark to holistically assess the privacy risks faced by NLP models. In this paper, we present a privacy attack and defense evaluation benchmark in the field of NLP, which includes the conventional/small models and large language models (LLMs). This benchmark supports a variety of models, datasets, and protocols, along with standardized modules for comprehensive evaluation of attacks and defense strategies. Based on the above framework, we present a study on the association between auxiliary data from different domains and the strength of privacy attacks. And we provide an improved attack method in this scenario with the help of Knowledge Distillation (KD). Furthermore, we propose a chained framework for privacy attacks. Allowing a practitioner to chain multiple attacks to achieve a higher-level attack objective. Based on this, we provide some defense and enhanced attack strategies. The code for reproducing the results can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/nlp_doctor-AF48