Tabinda Sarwar
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.
CLARITY: A Framework and Benchmark for Conversational Language Ambiguity and Unanswerability in Interactive NL2SQL Systems
Tabinda Sarwar | Farhad Moghimifar | Cong Duy Vu Hoang | Xiaoxiao Ma | Shawn Chang Xu | Fahimeh Saleh | Poorya Zaremoodi | Avirup Sil | Katrin Kirchhoff
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Tabinda Sarwar | Farhad Moghimifar | Cong Duy Vu Hoang | Xiaoxiao Ma | Shawn Chang Xu | Fahimeh Saleh | Poorya Zaremoodi | Avirup Sil | Katrin Kirchhoff
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
NL2SQL systems deployed in industry settings often encounter ambiguous or unanswerable queries, particularly in interactive scenarios with incomplete user clarification. Existing benchmarks typically assume a single source of ambiguity and rely on user interaction for resolution, overlooking realistic failure modes.We introduce Clarity, a framework for automatically generating an NL2SQL benchmark with multi-faceted ambiguities and diverse user behaviors across both single- and multi-turn settings. Using a constraint-driven pipeline, Clarity transforms executable SQL into ambiguous queries, augmented with grounded conversational continuations and schema-level metadata.Empirical evaluation on Spider and BIRD shows that leading NL2SQL systems, including those based on strong LLMs, suffer significant performance degradation under multi-faceted ambiguity. While these systems often detect ambiguity, they struggle to accurately localize and resolve the underlying schema-level sources. Our results highlight the need for more robust ambiguity detection and resolution in industry-grade NL2SQL systems.