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Abstract
Machine unlearning, the study of efficiently removing the impact of specific
training instances on a model, has garnered increased attention in recent years
due to regulatory guidelines such as the \emph{Right to be Forgotten}.
Achieving precise unlearning typically involves fully retraining the model and
is computationally infeasible in case of very large models such as Large
Language Models (LLMs). To this end, recent work has proposed several
algorithms which approximate the removal of training data without retraining
the model. These algorithms crucially rely on access to the model parameters in
order to update them, an assumption that may not hold in practice due to
computational constraints or having only query access to the LLMs. In this
work, we propose a new class of unlearning methods for LLMs called ``In-Context
Unlearning.'' This method unlearns instances from the model by simply providing
specific kinds of inputs in context, without the need to update model
parameters. To unlearn specific training instances, we present these instances
to the LLMs at inference time along with labels that differ from their ground
truth. Our experimental results demonstrate that in-context unlearning performs
on par with, or in some cases outperforms other state-of-the-art methods that
require access to model parameters, effectively removing the influence of
specific instances on the model while preserving test accuracy.