HCAI-Lab/w2-consensus-deepdive-unlearning-artifacts / social-data-attribution-w2 /artifacts /methodology.tex
| % ============================================================ | |
| % METHOD | |
| % ============================================================ | |
| \section{Method}\label{sec:method} | |
| We study capability provenance through aggregate training-data attribution on an open | |
| pretraining corpus. The method has five stages: start from a deduplicated pretraining | |
| population, enrich each document with taxonomy labels and token-count metadata, draw a | |
| token-budgeted working set stratified over the taxonomy bins, compute gradient-based | |
| attribution scores for every document in that working set, and aggregate attribution over | |
| WebOrganizer bins rather than over isolated documents. | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| \subsection{Problem Setup and Notation}\label{sec:notation} | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| Let $f_\theta$ denote the pretrained language model under study. For a benchmark query $q$ | |
| with answer options $\{a_1,\dots,a_m\}$, the model assigns scores $s(q,a)$ and predicts | |
| $\hat{a}(q)=\arg\max_a s(q,a)$. We study four benchmark families: SocialIQA, MMLU Social | |
| Sciences, GSM8K, and MMLU-STEM. | |
| We distinguish two corpus levels throughout the paper. Let $\mathcal{D}_{\mathrm{pop}}$ | |
| denote the full deduplicated pretraining population, and let | |
| $\mathcal{D}_{\mathrm{work}} \subset \mathcal{D}_{\mathrm{pop}}$ denote the sampled | |
| working set used for empirical attribution. This distinction matters for interpreting | |
| results: provenance claims are anchored to the population, but empirical findings are | |
| bounded by the working set. Every document $d \in \mathcal{D}_{\mathrm{work}}$ is assigned | |
| a WebOrganizer bin $b(d)\in\{1,\dots,\WebOrgNumBins\}$ from the format$\times$topic taxonomy. | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| \subsection{Working Set Construction}\label{sec:workingset} | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| Attribution claims require confirmed provenance: every document in the candidate pool must | |
| have been present in the model's actual training data. OLMo3-7B was trained on a 6T-token | |
| curated mix drawn from the larger 9T-token Dolma3 pool, where RegMix upsampling altered | |
| the natural corpus distribution. We work exclusively from the deduplicated 6T training mix | |
| to avoid attributing influence to documents the model never saw. | |
| \paragraph{Model.} | |
| We study OLMo3-7B Base~\citep{olmo3} (\texttt{allenai/Olmo-3-1025-7B}), a | |
| 7-billion-parameter language model pretrained on the Dolma3 | |
| corpus~\citep{soldaini_dolma_2024}. We use the base variant without instruction tuning so | |
| that attribution scores reflect pretraining data influence directly. | |
| \paragraph{Upstream population.} | |
| The paper's provenance claims are anchored to the deduplicated 6T Dolma3 training mix, | |
| which contains \num{1263587168} unique documents. This full population is the source from | |
| which the working set is drawn; it should not be read as implying exhaustive attribution | |
| over all available documents. | |
| \paragraph{Deduplication.} | |
| We deduplicate the 6T training mix at the document level using a Bloom filter over document | |
| identifiers, reducing the corpus from approximately 2.7B raw document slots to 1.26B unique | |
| documents. This step collapses the upsampling introduced by RegMix curation and recovers | |
| the set of distinct training examples. | |
| \paragraph{Enrichment.} | |
| All 1.26B unique documents are labeled with WebOrganizer topic and format categories using | |
| four DeBERTa-v3-base classifiers~\citep{li2024weborganizer}, producing a 24-topic $\times$ | |
| 24-format taxonomy with 576 bins. Each document receives a top-1 topic label, a top-1 | |
| format label, and the full probability vector over both label spaces. Labels are stored as | |
| per-shard Parquet sidecars and joined into a unified corpus manifest. | |
| \paragraph{Labels.} | |
| Each document carries a document identifier, token count, and top-1 WebOrganizer topic and | |
| format labels with associated confidences, yielding a bin assignment | |
| $b(d) \in \{1,\dots,\WebOrgNumBins\}$. | |
| \paragraph{Stratified sampling.} | |
| From the enriched 1.26B-document corpus, we draw a stratified working sample by selecting | |
| $n$ documents per bin (uniformly at random within each of the 576 bins), using a | |
| deterministic priority function based on a keyed hash of the document identifier (BLAKE2b | |
| with seed 42). This produces a balanced candidate pool where every bin is equally | |
| represented, enabling direct cross-bin comparisons without reweighting. Documents below a | |
| minimum token-count threshold are excluded before sampling to reduce noise in gradient | |
| computation. The working sample is materialized as sharded JSONL with per-document | |
| metadata (token count, bin assignment, shard provenance) in an accompanying Parquet | |
| manifest. | |
| \paragraph{Working set.} | |
| The empirical analysis operates on a stratified sample of \AttrDocCount{} documents | |
| (${\sim}$\AttrTokensM{}M tokens) drawn from the population across all \WebOrgNumBins{} | |
| WebOrganizer~\citep{wettig2025weborganizer} bins (500 documents per bin). The working set | |
| is defined primarily by token budget, with a minimum floor of \num{\WebOrgTokensPerBinM}M | |
| tokens per bin. Realized document counts are an output of sampling, not a fixed input. | |
| Underfilled bins, if any, are reported explicitly in the appendix. | |
| \paragraph{Preconditioner sample.} | |
| A separate 100K-document uniform random sample (without stratification) is drawn from the | |
| full 1.26B corpus for building preconditioner matrices (\S\ref{sec:preconditioner}). This | |
| sample is independent of the stratified working sample and covers the natural corpus | |
| distribution. | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| \subsection{Gradient-Based Attribution}\label{sec:attribution} | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| We compute document-level attribution scores over the entire working set | |
| $\mathcal{D}_{\mathrm{work}}$ using TrackStar~\citep{chang_scalable_2024}, a gradient-based | |
| influence method implemented in the Bergson library. For each benchmark family $\beta$, we | |
| first extract a mean query gradient by averaging the per-query loss gradients across all | |
| evaluation queries $q \in \mathcal{Q}_\beta$. Model gradients are projected into a | |
| low-dimensional space via Rademacher random projections, making corpus-scale scoring | |
| tractable on commodity GPUs. Attribution scores are then the dot product between each | |
| projected training-document gradient and the mean query gradient: | |
| \[ | |
| I(\beta, d) = \langle \phi(\nabla_\theta \ell(d)), \; \bar{\phi}(\nabla_\theta \ell(\mathcal{Q}_\beta)) \rangle | |
| \] | |
| where $\phi$ denotes the random projection and $\bar{\phi}$ the mean-reduced query | |
| projection. Scores are signed: positive values indicate that a document supports the | |
| model's behavior on the benchmark, while negative values indicate opposition. An optional | |
| preconditioner (inverse Hessian approximation) rescales projections to improve calibration. | |
| Because we score every document in $\mathcal{D}_{\mathrm{work}}$ rather than a retrieved | |
| subset, the resulting influence distribution reflects the full working set and is not | |
| filtered by lexical or semantic similarity to the query. This exhaustive scoring is central | |
| to the paper's design: it allows us to discover influential corpus regions that would be | |
| missed by retrieval-based candidate selection. Full hyperparameter and compute details are | |
| in Appendix~\ref{app:attribution-pipeline}. | |
| \paragraph{Benchmarks.} | |
| We evaluate on a $2 \times 2$ contrastive grid crossing domain (social vs.\ math) with | |
| capability type (reasoning vs.\ knowledge): | |
| % | |
| \begin{center} | |
| \begin{tabular}{lcc} | |
| \toprule | |
| & Reasoning & Knowledge \\ | |
| \midrule | |
| Social & SocialIQA & MMLU Social Sciences \\ | |
| Math & GSM8K & MMLU STEM \\ | |
| \bottomrule | |
| \end{tabular} | |
| \end{center} | |
| % | |
| This design enables contrastive analysis: influence patterns that are specific to social | |
| reasoning (SocialIQA) can be distinguished from those shared with math reasoning (GSM8K) | |
| or social knowledge (MMLU-SS), and from domain-general patterns that appear across all four | |
| benchmarks. | |
| \paragraph{Benchmark specifications.} | |
| All evaluations follow the OLMo3 evaluation protocol~\citep{olmo3} to ensure per-query | |
| labels are consistent with published accuracy numbers. SocialIQA uses 5-shot | |
| log-likelihood ranking over three answer choices on \num{10000} items. MMLU Social Sciences | |
| (12 subjects, \num{3077} items) and MMLU-STEM (18 subjects, \num{3018} items) use 5-shot | |
| log-likelihood ranking in the OLMES format~\citep{gu2024olmes}. GSM8K uses 8-shot | |
| chain-of-thought decoding with sampling (temperature 0.6, top-$p$ 0.6, 8 repeats) | |
| evaluated by pass@1 on \num{1319} items: | |
| \[ | |
| \mathrm{pass@}k = 1 - \frac{\binom{n - c}{k}}{\binom{n}{k}}, | |
| \] | |
| where $n = 8$ is the number of samples and $c$ is the number of correct samples. | |
| \paragraph{Query construction.} | |
| For each benchmark, we run OLMo3-7B Base through the OLMES evaluation harness to produce | |
| per-query metadata files recording the model's predictions, correctness labels, and input | |
| formatting. These outputs are transformed into the JSONL format expected by Bergson for | |
| query gradient indexing: each record contains a prompt string and, for multiple-choice | |
| benchmarks, the correct-answer completion. This ensures that the gradients used for | |
| attribution reflect the model's actual loss landscape on each evaluation item. | |
| \paragraph{Attribution configuration.} | |
| We compute influence scores over the full working set using | |
| TrackStar~\citep{chang_scalable_2024} via the Bergson library (v\BergsonVersion{}). | |
| Gradients are projected to dimension $d{=}\AttrProjectionDim{}$ via Rademacher random | |
| projections, yielding \AttrPerModuleDim{}-dimensional representations per module. For the | |
| exploratory run, we use unpreconditioned Mode~B scoring; the production pipeline uses a | |
| preconditioned Mode~A gradient index for efficiency. Full hyperparameters are in | |
| Table~\ref{tab:attr-hparams}. | |
| \paragraph{Staged execution.} | |
| To reduce compute risk and catch pipeline issues early, we use a staged protocol. | |
| Exploratory runs on a 500-documents-per-bin sample (\AttrDocCount{} documents total, | |
| \AttrGPUHoursExplore{} GPU-hours on H100/H200) validate the attribution and aggregation | |
| pipeline before scaling to the full working set. | |
| \paragraph{Compute.} | |
| The exploratory attribution run required \AttrGPUHoursExplore{} GPU-hours on NVIDIA | |
| H100/H200 GPUs across 69 jobs (4 reduce, 64 score, 1 aggregate). The production Mode~A | |
| pipeline reduces marginal cost per additional benchmark to near zero after the initial | |
| gradient-index build. Full compute breakdowns are in Table~\ref{tab:attr-compute}. | |
| \paragraph{Gradient computation.} | |
| For each example $x$ (training document or evaluation query), Bergson performs a forward | |
| pass through the model, computes the per-example cross-entropy loss $\ell(x; \theta)$, and | |
| extracts per-sample gradients via backward hooks on all linear-layer weight matrices | |
| (attention Q/K/V/O and MLP projections, excluding biases). The resulting gradient vector is | |
| high-dimensional (one entry per parameter per module). To make computation and storage | |
| tractable, each module's gradient is compressed via random projection using a Rademacher | |
| matrix~\citep{achlioptas2003database} to a $d \times d$ block, where $d$ is the projection | |
| dimension. | |
| We set $d = 16$, yielding a 256-dimensional projected gradient per module. All gradients | |
| are computed in fp32 for numerical stability. Bergson packs examples into batches by token | |
| count rather than example count, with a token budget of 1{,}024 tokens per forward pass; | |
| sequences exceeding this budget are truncated. | |
| After projection, each gradient vector is normalized to unit length before scoring. This | |
| converts raw dot products into cosine-like similarities and prevents modules with larger | |
| gradient norms from dominating the aggregated score. | |
| \paragraph{Scoring.} | |
| The influence of training document $j$ on query $i$ is computed as | |
| \[ | |
| s(j, i) = \sum_{k \in \mathcal{K}} \hat{g}_k(x_j)^\top \hat{g}_k(q_i), | |
| \] | |
| where $\mathcal{K}$ is the set of model modules, $\hat{g}_k(\cdot)$ denotes the | |
| unit-normalized projected gradient at module $k$, and $x_j$ and $q_i$ are training | |
| document $j$ and query $i$ respectively. Positive scores indicate that document $j$ pushes | |
| the model toward the behavior exhibited on query $i$; negative scores indicate the | |
| opposite. | |
| \paragraph{Pipeline architecture.} | |
| We use Bergson's Mode~B (reduce/score) workflow, which operates in three phases with SLURM | |
| dependency chaining so that each phase runs only if the previous one succeeded: | |
| \begin{enumerate} | |
| \item \textbf{Reduce.} For each benchmark, all query gradients are aggregated into a | |
| single mean gradient vector via \texttt{bergson reduce}. This collapses the per-query | |
| structure into one representative gradient per benchmark. | |
| \item \textbf{Score.} The training corpus is partitioned into $N$ JSONL shards via | |
| round-robin distribution. Each shard is scored independently against each reduced query | |
| gradient via \texttt{bergson score}: document gradients are computed on-the-fly, dotted | |
| against the reduced query vector, and discarded. This yields one scalar influence score | |
| per document per benchmark without materializing the full training gradient index. | |
| \item \textbf{Aggregate.} All shard scores for a given benchmark are concatenated and | |
| the top-$k$ documents are selected via partial sorting (\texttt{np.argpartition}). | |
| \end{enumerate} | |
| For the full working sample, Phase~2 submits $N \times Q$ GPU jobs (one per shard--query | |
| pair), where $Q = 4$ benchmarks. Each score job requires a single H100 or H200 GPU | |
| (OLMo3-7B in fp32 uses approximately 28\,GB VRAM for gradient computation). Phase~3 runs | |
| on CPU only. | |
| \paragraph{Score extraction.} | |
| After aggregation, we extract all per-document scores (not just top-$k$) and join them | |
| with the corpus manifest to produce a combined Parquet file with columns for document | |
| identifier, per-benchmark influence scores, bin assignment (topic, format, bin ID), and | |
| token count. This file is the input to all downstream analysis. | |
| \paragraph{Model variants.} | |
| The primary attribution results use OLMo3-7B Base (\texttt{allenai/Olmo-3-1025-7B}), the | |
| pretrained checkpoint before any post-training. We additionally prepare query gradient | |
| indexes for the instruct-tuned checkpoint (\texttt{allenai/Olmo-3-7B-Instruct}) in two | |
| query formats: direct answer (\texttt{instruct\_base}) and chain-of-thought | |
| (\texttt{instruct\_cot}). These variant indexes use the same Bergson parameters and | |
| training corpus as the base runs, enabling direct comparison of how post-training reshapes | |
| attribution patterns while holding the pretraining data constant. | |
| \paragraph{Preconditioner.}\label{sec:preconditioner} | |
| Unpreconditioned gradient inner products treat all parameter directions equally. | |
| Preconditioners rescale gradients by an approximation to the inverse Hessian, upweighting | |
| informative directions and downweighting noisy ones~\citep{grosse2023studying}. | |
| We build the TrackStar mixed preconditioner in three steps: | |
| \begin{enumerate} | |
| \item \textbf{Value preconditioner.} Compute second-moment (Fisher) matrices over the | |
| 100K-document random sample (\S\ref{sec:workingset}) by running a full gradient-index | |
| build with Bergson. | |
| \item \textbf{Query preconditioner.} Compute the same matrices over the evaluation | |
| query set. | |
| \item \textbf{Mix.} Combine the value and query preconditioners via the TrackStar mixing | |
| procedure with a target downweight of 1{,}000 components, producing a single mixed | |
| preconditioner matrix per module. | |
| \end{enumerate} | |
| The mixed preconditioner is factored via eigendecomposition | |
| ($\mathbf{P}_k = \mathbf{V}_k \boldsymbol{\Lambda}_k \mathbf{V}_k^\top$ for each module | |
| $k$) and applied to gradients before scoring. When preconditioners are active, the | |
| influence score becomes | |
| \[ | |
| s(j, i) = \sum_{k \in \mathcal{K}} \hat{g}_k(x_j)^\top \mathbf{P}_k^{-1} \hat{g}_k(q_i). | |
| \] | |
| Exploratory runs use \texttt{--skip\_preconditioners} for faster iteration; the | |
| preconditioned path is reserved for the final reporting runs. | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| \subsection{Aggregate Bin-Level Analysis}\label{sec:aggregation} | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| Our central methodological choice is to aggregate attribution over WebOrganizer bins. For a | |
| benchmark family $\beta$ and bin $k$, we report signed influence mass | |
| \[ | |
| M_\beta(k)=\sum_{d\in\mathcal{D}_{\mathrm{work}}:\,b(d)=k} I(\beta,d) | |
| \] | |
| and absolute influence mass | |
| \[ | |
| A_\beta(k)=\sum_{d\in\mathcal{D}_{\mathrm{work}}:\,b(d)=k} |I(\beta,d)|. | |
| \] | |
| These aggregated quantities let us compare benchmark families in terms of where attribution | |
| mass accumulates, which bins dominate support, and how influence distributions shift between | |
| social and non-social tasks. | |
| We further stratify the analysis by benchmark family and, when stable enough to be | |
| meaningful, by correctness partition. This supports comparisons such as SocialIQA versus | |
| MMLU Social Sciences, or social targets versus math/STEM controls, without | |
| over-interpreting individual document-level scores. | |
| Raw per-document scores are also aggregated to the WebOrganizer bin level to produce the | |
| paper's primary analytic unit. For each benchmark $b$ and bin $c$, we compute the mean | |
| influence score | |
| \[ | |
| \bar{s}_{b,c} = \frac{1}{|D_c|} \sum_{j \in D_c} s_b(j), | |
| \] | |
| where $D_c$ is the set of documents assigned to bin $c$ and $s_b(j)$ is the influence | |
| score of document $j$ for benchmark $b$. This yields a $576 \times 4$ matrix of bin-level | |
| influence values that can be visualized as $24 \times 24$ heatmaps (topic $\times$ format) | |
| per benchmark, and compared across the $2 \times 2$ contrastive grid. | |
| \paragraph{Contrastive distribution shift.} | |
| The central analytic question is how influence mass redistributes across bins when moving | |
| between benchmarks. We quantify this by comparing the ranked bin-influence vectors across | |
| the four benchmarks using Spearman rank correlation, identifying bins whose influence is | |
| domain-specific (high for one benchmark, low for others) versus domain-general | |
| (consistently high or low across all four). | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| \subsection{Stability and Characterization}\label{sec:stability} | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| To assess whether aggregate findings are robust enough to support interpretation, we | |
| estimate uncertainty through bootstrap resampling over evaluation queries and, where | |
| appropriate, over within-bin sampled documents. We report stability in terms of confidence | |
| intervals, rank consistency of high-support bins, and agreement of benchmark-level | |
| distribution summaries under resampling. | |
| For high-support bins, we then move from attribution scores to corpus characterization. | |
| Documents in those bins are summarized using provenance fields, genre/source cues, and | |
| lightweight discourse markers so that the paper can describe influential regions in | |
| human-interpretable terms rather than only as numeric cells in a heatmap. | |
| \paragraph{Causal validation.} | |
| We complement the aggregate attribution analysis with machine-unlearning experiments | |
| (\S\ref{sec:unlearning}) that selectively remove documents from high-influence bins and | |
| measure the resulting benchmark degradation. These interventions serve as causal validation | |
| of the strongest aggregate findings rather than as the core methodological contribution. | |
| The main scientific object of the paper remains the aggregate attribution structure itself. | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| \subsection{Causal Validation via Machine Unlearning}\label{sec:unlearning} | |
| % ------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| Training-data attribution provides associational evidence: high influence mass in a bin | |
| suggests that the corpus region supports a given benchmark behavior, but it does not | |
| establish that the region is causally necessary. We therefore complement the aggregate | |
| attribution findings with targeted machine unlearning experiments that treat bin-level | |
| forgetting as a direct test of causal impact. Our framing follows~\citet{bu2025ngdiff} and | |
| extends it to the WebOrganizer taxonomy level. | |
| We structure the intervention around two axes: whether influence scores guide document | |
| selection (random sampling vs.\ Bergson-guided), and the scope of forgetting (single bin | |
| vs.\ multiple bins vs.\ no bin specified). The random-sampling experiments serve as the | |
| primary baseline; the influence-guided experiments test whether Bergson scores carry | |
| document-level discriminative power beyond bin membership alone. | |
| \paragraph{Optimization.} | |
| Both intervention types use the same unlearning procedure. Following~\citet{bu2025ngdiff}, | |
| we minimize | |
| \[ | |
| \mathcal{L}(\theta) = -\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{forget}}(\theta) + w_{\mathrm{retain}} \cdot \mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{retain}}(\theta), | |
| \] | |
| with the NGDiff update direction | |
| \[ | |
| g_{\mathrm{update}} = \frac{g_{\mathrm{retain}}}{\|g_{\mathrm{retain}}\|} - \frac{g_{\mathrm{forget}}}{\|g_{\mathrm{forget}}\|}, | |
| \] | |
| which normalizes both gradient components so that neither dominates regardless of bin size | |
| or loss scale. We apply an automatic Hessian-free learning rate adapted every 10 steps via | |
| two additional forward passes on the retain set. All runs use LoRA (rank~8, applied to | |
| Q/K/V/O projections) for parameter efficiency, following the published NGDiff setup for | |
| 7B-scale models. Full hyperparameters are listed in Table~\ref{tab:unlearn-hyperparams}. | |
| \paragraph{Data.} | |
| For all unlearning experiments, document identity is established against the deduplicated | |
| 6T Dolma3 training mix using confirmed provenance from our working set construction | |
| (\S\ref{sec:workingset}); only documents verified as present in OLMo3-7B's actual training | |
| population are eligible for forget or retain sets. | |
| \paragraph{Stopping criterion and evaluation.} | |
| We stop unlearning when the forget-set perplexity reaches or exceeds the base model's | |
| perplexity on a token-shuffled version of the forget set, indicating that the model has | |
| lost structured knowledge of those documents. A secondary safety guard halts training if | |
| general-capability performance (a 100-question inline MMLU subset) drops below 90\% of | |
| baseline. A hard ceiling of 5{,}000 optimizer steps applies in all runs. We evaluate all | |
| four benchmarks every 250 steps so that capability specificity can be assessed throughout | |
| training: a bin that is causally relevant to social reasoning should produce larger | |
| degradation on SocialIQA than on GSM8K. | |
| \subsubsection{Random-Baseline Experiments}\label{sec:unlearn-random} | |
| The random-sampling experiments establish the causal baseline: how much does forgetting a | |
| semantically defined corpus region degrade benchmark performance when documents are selected | |
| without reference to influence scores? | |
| \paragraph{Single-Bin Unlearning.} | |
| We independently unlearn each of the 24 WebOrganizer topic bins from OLMo3-7B Base and | |
| measure causal impact on all four benchmarks. For each bin $b$, the forget set consists of | |
| up to 1{,}000 confirmed trained-on documents drawn from that bin; the retain set is a | |
| stratified proportional sample of 9{,}000 documents from the remaining 23 bins, refreshed | |
| each epoch. This produces a $24 \times 4$ degradation matrix | |
| $\gamma_{b,j} = (A_{\mathrm{unlearned}} - A_{\mathrm{baseline}}) / A_{\mathrm{baseline}}$ | |
| for each bin $b$ and benchmark $j$, and a corresponding heatmap. A bin that produces larger | |
| degradation on its target benchmark than on contrastive controls provides direct causal | |
| evidence that the corresponding corpus region is load-bearing for that capability. | |
| \paragraph{Multi-Bin Targeted Unlearning.} | |
| We extend single-bin unlearning to groups of semantically aligned bins, testing joint | |
| causal impact and scaling behavior. Each benchmark is associated with three nested bin | |
| groups of increasing size (3, 5, and 7 bins; Group~A $\subset$ Group~B $\subset$ Group~C), | |
| defined in Table~\ref{tab:topic-groups}. The forget set is the union of documents from all | |
| bins in the selected group; the retain set excludes all documents whose topic appears in | |
| that group. This design tests how much aligned knowledge must be removed to produce | |
| measurable capability degradation, and whether the effect scales with group size. | |
| \paragraph{Null-Bin Control.} | |
| We unlearn a randomly sampled cross-topic set of the same size as the average single-topic | |
| forget set, with no semantic alignment to any benchmark. This establishes the procedural | |
| degradation baseline attributable to the unlearning procedure itself. All $\gamma$ values | |
| from Experiments~1 and~2 are interpreted relative to this null baseline: net causal impact | |
| is $\gamma_{\mathrm{topic}} - \gamma_{\mathrm{null}}$. | |
| \subsubsection{Influence-Guided Experiments}\label{sec:unlearn-guided} | |
| The influence-guided experiments test the core validation claim: if Bergson influence | |
| scores have document-level discriminative power, then forgetting high-influence documents | |
| should produce stronger benchmark degradation than forgetting random documents from the | |
| same bin. Experiments~1--3 provide the random-matched baselines against which these results | |
| are interpreted. | |
| \paragraph{Influence-Guided Single-Bin Unlearning.} | |
| For the top 2--3 bins identified by Single-Bin Unlearning as having the largest causal | |
| impact on SocialIQA, we run NGDiff unlearning on three matched forget sets constructed from | |
| the same bin: | |
| \begin{itemize} | |
| \item \textbf{Condition~A} (top-$k$): the $k$ most influential documents ranked by | |
| aggregate Bergson influence score over the SocialIQA query set. | |
| \item \textbf{Condition~B} (random-matched): $k$ documents sampled uniformly at random | |
| from the same bin, matched on token-count distribution. This is directly comparable to | |
| the Experiment~1 baseline. | |
| \item \textbf{Condition~C} (bottom-$k$): the $k$ lowest-influence documents from the | |
| same bin. | |
| \end{itemize} | |
| The three-way contrast (A vs.\ B vs.\ C) tests whether Bergson scores resolve finer-grained | |
| causal structure beyond what bin membership alone predicts. The key success criterion is a | |
| clear within-bin targetedness gradient on SocialIQA---high-influence drop $>$ random drop | |
| $>$ near-zero drop---with substantially smaller off-target degradation on GSM8K and | |
| MMLU-STEM. | |
| \paragraph{Influence-Guided Multi-Bin Unlearning.} | |
| For the same SocialIQA-aligned bin groups from Multi-Bin Unlearning, we run NGDiff | |
| unlearning selecting the top-$k$ documents by aggregate Bergson score from the combined | |
| group, rather than sampling randomly. The random-matched baseline is the corresponding | |
| Multi-Bin Unlearning run on the same bin group. This tests whether influence-guided | |
| selection improves unlearning efficiency at the group level. | |
| \paragraph{Influence-Guided Null-Bin Unlearning.} | |
| Without specifying a bin, we run NGDiff unlearning on the top-$k$ documents from the | |
| entire working set ranked by Bergson influence score for SocialIQA. This tests whether | |
| document-level influence scores alone, unconstrained by taxonomy structure, identify | |
| causally load-bearing data---and serves as a complement to Null-Bin Unlearning at the | |
| influence-guided level. |
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