LUNE: Efficient LLM Unlearning via LoRA Fine-Tuning with Negative Examples

摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode vast factual knowledge, yet their inability to selectively forget specific information hinders privacy protection, bias mitigation, and post-deployment correction. We present LoRA-based Unlearning with Negative Examples (LUNE), a lightweight framework that performs negative-only unlearning by updating only low-rank adapters while freezing the backbone, thereby localizing edits and avoiding disruptive global changes. Leveraging Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), LUNE targets intermediate representations to suppress (or replace) requested knowledge with an order-of-magnitude lower compute and memory than full fine-tuning or direct weight editing. Extensive experiments on multiple factual unlearning tasks show that LUNE: (I) achieves effectiveness comparable to full fine-tuning and memory-editing methods; and (II) reduces computational cost by about an order of magnitude.