Cascade: Hierarchical Recoverability Control for Large Language Model Unlearning
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.16890 (cs)
[Submitted on 15 Sep 2026]
Title:Cascade: Hierarchical Recoverability Control for Large Language Model Unlearning
Authors:Qingchen Yu, Shiying Duan, Xiaodong Li, Yuhua Wang, Zhiyu Li, Shiji Zhou, Yifan Sun, Zhaoxin Fan
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Abstract:Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning is essential for removing sensitive or copyrighted knowledge while preserving general utility. Existing methods often leave residual knowledge in intermediate representations, which can still be recovered. To address this, we propose Cascade, a hierarchical recoverability control framework that minimizes the internal identifiability of target knowledge. Cascade combines three complementary controls: path-level routing to suppress privacy-associated activation routes, representation-level compression to reduce geometric separability, and decoding-level intervention to limit residual recovery. Experiments on TOFU, MUSE-News, and WMDP, including robustness tests with query reformulation and extraction-style prompts, show that Cascade effectively reduces recoverability while maintaining stable model utility.
| Comments: | Accepted by EMNLP 2026 (Findings) |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.16890 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.16890v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.16890
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Cascade: Hierarchical Recoverability Control for Large Language Model Unlearning, by Qingchen Yu and 7 other authors
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