Bitter Lessons from Distillation Robustifies Unlearning

Bruce W. Lee. Machine Unlearning. Distillation. AI Safety.

Introduction My collaborators and I wrote a paper titled "Distillation Robustifies Unlearning" a few months ago. I'm writing this post to communicate what I think our paper actually says about the problem of unlearning. This is more of a personal account than a group statement. This post is also somewhat intuition-heavy because the goal is to describe the worldview that emerged from working on a paper. Additionally, I'll argue that distillation is an excellent opportunity for a safety intervention that also happens to align with economic incentives. Therefore, I think any future effort to unde

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