Siyuan Tang

Author directory

2026

Large language models (LLMs) often memorize personally identifiable information (PII) during training, raising serious privacy concerns. While machine unlearning has emerged as a promising mitigation, its effectiveness against privacy attacks remains unclear. We introduce PrivUn, an evaluation framework for privacy unlearning under recovery attacks, paired with three measurement tools: forgetting scores, association metrics, and layer-wise analysis of forgetting depth. This framework studies not only whether a model forgets, but also how forgetting propagates and where it fails.

Using PrivUn, we make two findings. (i) The PII ripple effect is gradient-driven, not semantic. Graph-based proximity is uncorrelated with PII forgetting, while gradient-based association is more strongly correlated. (ii) Label-based unlearning is typically shallow, while PII is stored across deeper layers. Layer-wise evidence suggests that label-based methods mainly change the final layers, explaining why they reduce direct retrieval but remain vulnerable to stronger recovery attacks.

2025

There has been increasing interest in building multilingual foundation models for NLP and speech research. This paper examines how to expand the speech translation capability of these models with restricted data. Whisper, a speech foundation model with strong performance on speech recognition and English translation, is used as the example model. Using speech-to-speech retrieval to analyse the audio representations generated by the encoder, we show that utterances from different languages are mapped to a shared semantic space. This shared embedding space can then be leveraged for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in speech translation. By fine-tuning the Whisper decoder with only English-to-Chinese speech translation data, improved performance for translation to Chinese can be obtained for multiple languages, in addition to English. Furthermore, for languages related to those seen in training it is possible to perform speech translation, despite the model never seeing the language in training, or being able to perform transcription.