FAME: Fictional Actors for Multilingual Erasure

Claudio Savelli, Moreno La Quatra, Alkis Koudounas, Flavio Giobergia


Abstract
Large Language Models trained on web-scale data raise concerns about privacy and the right to be forgotten. To address these issues, Machine Unlearning provides techniques to remove specific information from trained models without retraining from scratch. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating unlearning in LLMs face two major limitations: they focus only on English and support only entity-level forgetting (removing all information about a person). We introduce FAME (Fictional Actors for Multilingual Erasure), a synthetic benchmark for evaluating Machine Unlearning across five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. FAME contains 1,000 fictional actor biographies and 20,000 question-answer pairs. Each biography includes information on 20 topics organized into structured categories (biography, career, achievements, personal information). This design enables both entity-level unlearning (i.e., forgetting entire identities) and instance-level unlearning (i.e., forgetting specific facts while retaining others). We provide two dataset splits to support these two different unlearning scenarios and enable systematic comparison of unlearning techniques across languages. Since FAME uses entirely fictional data, it ensures that the information was never encountered during model pretraining, allowing for a controlled evaluation of unlearning methods.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.200
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2557–2566
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-200
DOI:
10.63317/3npbbsyj2dd7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Claudio Savelli, Moreno La Quatra, Alkis Koudounas, and Flavio Giobergia. 2026. FAME: Fictional Actors for Multilingual Erasure. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2557–2566, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
FAME: Fictional Actors for Multilingual Erasure (Savelli et al., LREC 2026)
Copy Citation: