Jingyue Cong
Author directory2026
Decouple to Forget: Semantic Mediation for Sensitive Unlearning in Large Language Models
Jingyue Cong | Andy Song | Yang Yu | Tabinda Sarwar | Xinshu Li | Ziqi Xu | Xun Yi | Ke Wang | Bo Han | Estrid He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jingyue Cong | Andy Song | Yang Yu | Tabinda Sarwar | Xinshu Li | Ziqi Xu | Xun Yi | Ke Wang | Bo Han | Estrid He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Machine unlearning for large language models seeks to remove specified knowledge while preserving general capability, yet current methods often treat an entire response as the unit of forgetting. This coarse granularity causes unnecessary utility loss when the forget target is only a small set of sensitive facts embedded within otherwise benign explanations. In this paper, we introduce Decouple to Forget (D2F), a targeted unlearning method based on causal mediation that separates sensitive factual content from non-sensitive meaning and surface expression. For each example to be forgotten, D2F extracts a fact-level “mediator” representation from the answer, identifies which parts are sensitive, and removes only those parts while leaving the rest of the structure intact. We then generate counterfactual answers grounded in this mediator that preserve non-sensitive content but exclude sensitive facts, employing preference-based contrastive optimization to reduce the likelihood of information leakage while maintaining helpfulness and fluency. Experiments across various benchmark datasets show that D2F achieves a better balance between forgetting and retention than strong baseline methods. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/D2F-D596/.
Graph-Guided Selective Unlearning for Language Models: Controlling Support Routes Beyond Forget Seeds
Waqas Khan | Tabinda Sarwar | Jingyue Cong | Xun Yi | Estrid He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Waqas Khan | Tabinda Sarwar | Jingyue Cong | Xun Yi | Estrid He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Enterprises fine-tune language models on proprietary data that may later require removal due to privacy, contractual, or compliance obligations. Selective unlearning removes requested knowledge while preserving model utility, offering a practical alternative to full retraining, but existing methods treat the explicitly identified forget examples as the complete deletion scope. This is insufficient when target knowledge remains recoverable through paraphrases, aliases, or neighboring training examples. We propose GraphSU, a graph-guided controller that expands the deletion scope beyond forget seeds by constructing a weighted support-route graph, propagating deletion pressure through it, and applying graded forgetting strengths to high-risk neighbors. On TOFU and PISTOL with GPT-2 Medium and Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, GraphSU achieves the lowest utility-feasible soft leakage across all deletion settings, reducing leakage by up to 49.5 percentage points over a matched seed-only baseline, demonstrating that effective enterprise unlearning requires controlling support routes, not just forget seeds.
LatentRiskBench: Measuring State-Dependent Risks in Enterprise Agents
Jingyue Cong | Estrid He | Zhuang Li | Li Shen | Nan Wu | Yameng Peng | Xinshu Li | Andy Song
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Jingyue Cong | Estrid He | Zhuang Li | Li Shen | Nan Wu | Yameng Peng | Xinshu Li | Andy Song
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Enterprise agents face safety risks that cannot be determined from individual actions alone. Existing safety benchmarks largely evaluate action-local risks, overlooking failures whose safety depends on workflow state. In such state-dependent risks, the same action may be safe in one context but violate policy in another. Hence, we introduce LatentRiskBench for evaluating such state-dependent risks in enterprise settings. It pairs risky trajectories with benign counterparts that share the same terminal action but differ in latent policy-relevant states, requiring models to reconstruct workflow context rather than rely on action-level cues. We also introduce new metrics for state-dependent risk evaluation, including a suite of residual risk (RR) measures. Experiments on the benchmark show that action-level evaluation detects only 0.09 of state-dependent violations, whereas state-level evaluation reaches 0.96. Existing guardrail methods largely overlook such risks unless they are explicitly applied to workflow states. Case studies on a commercial deployed scenario further show that the safety metrics embedded in the benchmark provide a more realistic measure of safety for enterprise agents.