Waqas Khan
Author directory2026
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.