LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

“Distillation Robustifies Unlearning” by Bruce W. Lee, Addie Foote, alexinf, leni, Jacob G-W, Harish Kamath, Bryce Woodworth, cloud, TurnTrout

17 Jun 2025

Audio

Description

Current “unlearning” methods only suppress capabilities instead of truly unlearning the capabilities. But if you distill an unlearned model into a randomly initialized model, the resulting network is actually robust to relearning. We show why this works, how well it works, and how to trade off compute for robustness.Unlearn-and-Distill applies unlearning to a bad behavior and then distills the unlearned model into a new model. Distillation makes it way harder to retrain the new model to do the bad thing. Produced as part of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program in the winter 2024–25 cohort of the shard theory stream. Read our paper on ArXiv and enjoy an interactive demo. Robust unlearning probably reduces AI risk Maybe some future AI has long-term goals and humanity is in its way. Maybe future open-weight AIs have tons of bioterror expertise. If a system has dangerous knowledge, that system becomes [...] ---Outline:(01:01) Robust unlearning probably reduces AI risk(02:42) Perfect data filtering is the current unlearning gold standard(03:24) Oracle matching does not guarantee robust unlearning(05:05) Distillation robustifies unlearning(07:46) Trading unlearning robustness for compute(09:49) UNDO is better than other unlearning methods(11:19) Where this leaves us(11:22) Limitations(12:12) Insights and speculation(15:00) Future directions(15:35) Conclusion(16:07) Acknowledgments(16:50) CitationThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 13th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anX4QrNjhJqGFvrBr/distillation-robustifies-unlearning --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Transcription

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Help us prioritize this episode for transcription by upvoting it.

0 upvotes

🗳️ Sign in to Upvote

Popular episodes get transcribed faster

Other episodes from LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Transcribed and ready to explore now

"Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance" by Martin Sustrik

28 Jan 2026

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"The inaugural Redwood Research podcast" by Buck, ryan_greenblatt

27 Jan 2026

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don’t Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German" by jenn

26 Jan 2026

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

[Linkpost] "“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my first digital declutter" by mingyuan

20 Jan 2026

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Why we are excited about confession!" by boazbarak, Gabriel Wu, Manas Joglekar

19 Jan 2026

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language" by jchan

16 Jan 2026

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

View all episodes from LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.

Report any issue

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

“Distillation Robustifies Unlearning” by Bruce W. Lee, Addie Foote, alexinf, leni, Jacob G-W, Harish Kamath, Bryce Woodworth, cloud, TurnTrout

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other episodes from LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance" by Martin Sustrik

"The inaugural Redwood Research podcast" by Buck, ryan_greenblatt

"Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don’t Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German" by jenn

[Linkpost] "“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my first digital declutter" by mingyuan

"Why we are excited about confession!" by boazbarak, Gabriel Wu, Manas Joglekar

"Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language" by jchan

Sign in to Audioscrape

Share this moment