Zhijie Deng

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2026

Advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) intensify concerns about data safety, making Machine Unlearning (MU), the selective removal of harmful/private information, a critical necessity. However, existing MU benchmarks for MLLMs are limited by a lack of image diversity, coarse-grained unlearning target, and insufficient evaluation scenarios, which fail to capture the complexity of real-world applications. To facilitate the development of MLLMs unlearning and alleviate the aforementioned limitations, we introduce OFFSIDE, a novel benchmark for evaluating misinformation unlearning in MLLMs. This manually curated dataset contains 15.68K records for 80 players, providing a comprehensive framework with four test sets to assess forgetting efficacy, generalization, utility, and robustness. OFFSIDE supports advanced unlearning targets, such as fine-grained unlearning and visual rumor removal. Our extensive evaluation of multiple baselines not only extends key findings from LLM MU to MLLM MU: (1) unlearned rumors can be easily recovered through relearning and (2) all methods are vulnerable to prompt attacks, but also introduces novel insights in the context of MLLM: (1) unimodal methods fail to handle multimodal rumors, (2) unlearning efficacy is primarily driven by catastrophic forgetting statistically, and (3) all methods struggle with visual rumors (rumors embedded in images). These results expose significant vulnerabilities in current approaches, highlighting the need for more robust multimodal unlearning solutions.

2025

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) develop, their potential security issues have become increasingly prominent. Machine Unlearning (MU), as an effective strategy for forgetting specific knowledge in training data, has been widely used in privacy protection. However, MU for safety in MLLM has yet to be fully explored. To address this issue, we propose , a safety unlearning benchmark for MLLMs, consisting of 3,000 images and 28.8K VQA pairs. We comprehensively evaluate unlearning methods from two perspectives: forget quality and model utility. Our findings show that existing MU methods struggle to maintain model performance while implementing the forget operation and often suffer from over-forgetting. Hence, we introduce Prompt Decouple (PD) Loss to alleviate over-forgetting through decouple prompt during unlearning process. To quantitatively measure over-forgetting mitigated by PD Loss, we propose a new metric called Safe Answer Refusal Rate (SARR). Experimental results demonstrate that combining PD Loss with existing unlearning methods can effectively prevent over-forgetting and achieve a decrease of 79.5% in the SARR metric of LLaVA-7B and LLaVA-13B, while maintaining forget quality and model utility. Our code and dataset will be released upon acceptance. Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language and images, and reader discretion is recommended.