Overview

Training data attribution studies how particular examples or datasets affect a model’s behavior, helping researchers debug errors, audit provenance, select useful data, and assess safety. Common approaches include influence functions and gradient similarity, Shapley-style valuation, counterfactual retraining, and membership or provenance tests; newer methods use activations, training trajectories, and compressed gradient representations to scale attribution to large models. Evaluations span language-model knowledge and alignment, image and music generation, classification, and data selection, often comparing scores with retraining or known-inclusion benchmarks. A central challenge is that attribution depends on the counterfactual being asked about, while estimates can be costly, sensitive to interactions and evaluation choices, or confounded by similarity that does not establish causal influence.

Latest papers

83 papers19 papers in the last four weeks, up 111% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

May 15, 2026

ARIA: A Diagnostic Framework for Music Training Data Attribution

Training data attribution (TDA) for music generation must answer two questions that copyright analysis requires, namely which training songs influence a generated output and along which musical aspects the influence operates. Existing methods reduce influence to a single scalar, without revealing which musical aspects are dominant in that influence. We propose ARIA, a framework that decomposes attribution along musical aspects (five for symbolic music, three for audio) and pairs the decomposition with reliability diagnostics computed from the segment-level score matrix. It measures within-group similarity among the top-K attributed tracks against random reference groups drawn from the training pool, and diagnoses the score matrix through its singular value decomposition and column statistics. On a symbolic-music model where attribution ground truth is available through counterfactual retraining, the reliability diagnostics rank four attribution methods identically to that ground truth. On an audio music generation model, ARIA reveals attribution behaviors that vary substantially across TDA methods, flags score matrices whose retrieved tracks are nearly identical across queries rather than reflecting per-query attribution, and characterizes embedding-similarity retrieval baselines by the musical aspect each encoder surfaces. Together, ARIA produces per-aspect attribution evidence aligned with the musical aspects considered under the idea-expression distinction in copyright analysis.
May 15, 2026

Interaction-Aware Influence Functions for Group Attribution

Influence functions approximate how removing a training example changes a quantity of interest, called the target function, such as a held-out loss. To estimate the influence of a group of examples, the standard practice is to sum the individual influences of its members. However, this sum does not capture how examples jointly affect the target: a pair of examples may be redundant or complementary, but the sum cannot distinguish these cases. We propose an interaction-aware influence function that characterizes how interactions between examples influence the target. By expanding the target to second order around the trained parameters, we obtain an estimator that augments the standard sum with a pairwise interaction term that captures the alignment between two examples' effects on the target. We empirically evaluate our estimator in two settings. First, on six dataset-model pairs spanning logistic regression, MLPs, and ResNet-9, our estimator tracks leave-group-out retraining substantially better than first-order influence across all settings. Second, when used as a greedy selection rule for instruction-tuning data on Llama-3.1-8B, it beats prior influence-based and representation-similarity baselines on five of seven downstream tasks, in a regime where standard influence-based selection underperforms random selection.
May 15, 2026

On the Fragility of Data Attribution When Learning Is Distributed

Data attribution has become an important component of pricing, auditing, and governance in machine learning pipelines, yet most attribution methods implicitly assume that attribution values faithfully reflect participants' contributions. We show that this assumption can fail: a single participant in a standard distributed training workflow can substantially inflate its measured attribution value while preserving global utility. Our attribution-first attack uses latent optimization to inject small synthetic batches that preserve utility while exploiting non-IID label coverage and evaluator sensitivities. Across datasets, models, and multiple marginal-utility evaluators, the attack consistently increases the adversary's attribution value and reshapes the relative attribution structure among benign clients without degrading accuracy or triggering geometry-based defenses. These results show that attribution itself forms a new attack surface and motivate the development of attribution-robust and incentive-compatible scoring mechanisms.
May 12, 2026

Correcting Influence: Unboxing LLM Outputs with Orthogonal Latent Spaces

A critical step for reliable large language models (LLMs) use in healthcare is to attribute predictions to their training data, akin to a medical case study. This requires token-level precision: pinpointing not just which training examples influence a decision, but which tokens within them are responsible. While influence functions offer a principled framework for this, prior work is restricted to autoregressive settings and relies on an implicit assumption of token independence, rendering their identified influences unreliable. We introduce a flexible framework that infers token-level influence through a latent mediation approach for general prediction tasks. Our method attaches sparse autoencoders to any layer of a pretrained LLM to learn a basis of approximately independent latent features. Unlike prior methods where influence decomposes additively across tokens, influence computed over latent features is inherently non-decomposable. To address this, we introduce a novel method using Jacobian-vector products. Token-level influence is obtained by propagating latent attributions back to the input space via token activation patterns. We scale our approach using efficient inverse-Hessian approximations. Experiments on medical benchmarks show our approach identifies sparse, interpretable sets of tokens that jointly influence predictions. Our framework enhances trust and enables model auditing, generalizing to high-stakes domain requiring transparent and accountable decisions.
May 12, 2026

How Faithful Is Trajectory-Based Data Attribution? Error Sources, Remedies, and Practical Guidelines

Trajectory-based data attribution methods estimate the influence of training samples on model predictions by unrolling the training trajectory. They are widely used in applications such as data selection, data valuation, and model diagnosis, but there is a lack of comprehensive error analysis of these methods, raising concerns about method faithfulness and hindering reliable deployment. In this work, we provide the first systematic analysis of error sources in trajectory-based data attribution, together with concrete remedies to mitigate them and practical guidelines for downstream use. We organize the total error into three categories, config-level, algorithm-level, and system-level. We make three contributions. First, we identify optimizer mismatch as the dominant config-level error: existing methods derive their attribution under the assumption of SGD, even for models trained with the modern de facto optimizer AdamW. We propose AdamW-influence to fully account for AdamW's optimization dynamics, yielding improvements from 10% to over 300% in Spearman correlation between estimated and ground-truth influence across four settings spanning MLP, CNN, GPT-2, and Llama 3.2-1B. Second, we isolate the remaining algorithm-level error arising from the first-order Taylor approximation, identify the learning rate and trajectory length as factors governing the error magnitude, and derive a closed-form error proxy that can be evaluated along the original trajectory without retraining. Third, we translate these insights into practical guidelines for data selection by unifying offline and online strategies under a K-step look-ahead framework. Under this framework, online selection with a short horizon often matches or exceeds offline, and the optimal horizon can be tuned jointly with the learning rate. Together, these results turn the framework into an actionable selection recipe for practitioners.
May 11, 2026

Constraint-Data-Value-Maximization: Utilizing Data Attribution for Effective Data Pruning in Low-Data Environments

Attributing model behavior to training data is an evolving research field. A common benchmark is data removal, which involves eliminating data instances with either low or high values, then assessing a model's performance trained on the modified dataset. Many existing studies leverage Shapley-based data values for this task. In this paper, we demonstrate that these data values are not optimally suited for pruning low-value data when only a limited amount of data remains. To address this limitation, we introduce the Constraint-Data-Value-Maximization (CDVM) approach, which effectively utilizes data attributions for pruning in low-data scenarios. By casting pruning as a constrained optimization that both maximizes total influence and penalizes excessive per-test contributions, CDVM delivers robust performance when only a small fraction of the data is retained. On the OpenDataVal benchmark, CDVM shows strong performance and competitive runtime.
May 8, 2026

Quotient Semivalues for False-Name-Resistant Data Attribution

Data valuation methods allocate payments and audit training data's contribution to machine-learning pipelines; however, they often assume passive contributors. In reality, contributors can split datasets across pseudonymous identities, duplicate high-value examples, create near-duplicates, or launder synthetic variants to inflate their share. We formalize this as false-name manipulation in ML data attribution. Our main construction is the quotient semivalue mechanism: compute Shapley-, Banzhaf-, or Beta-style values over evidence-backed attribution clusters instead of raw identities, using a canonical-representative operator to absorb within-cluster duplication. We prove an impossibility: on a fixed monotone data-value game, exact Shapley-fair attribution over reported identities is incompatible with unrestricted false-name-proofness, even on binary-valued instances, and characterize the split-gain of a general semivalue on a unanimity counter-example. The mechanism is exactly false-name-proof under two structural conditions: false-name-neutral within-cluster allocation and quotient-stable manipulations. Under imperfect provenance, when these conditions hold approximately, manipulation gain and fairness loss are bounded by three measurable quantities: escaped-cluster mass, value-estimation error, and clustering distance. We instantiate the mechanisms in DataMarket-Gym, a benchmark for attribution under strategic provider attacks. On synthetic classification tasks, quotient semivalues with example-level evidence reduce manipulation gain on duplicate and near-duplicate Sybil attacks from 1.741.74 under baseline Shapley to 0.960.96, near the honest level. The cosine-threshold and (false-merge, false-split) rate sweeps trace the corresponding fairness--Sybil frontier.
May 7, 2026

FedAttr: Towards Privacy-preserving Client-Level Attribution in Federated LLM Fine-tuning

Watermark radioactivity testing type of methods can detect whether a model was trained on watermarked documents, and have become key tools for protecting data ownership in the fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Existing works have proved their effectiveness in centralized LLM fine-tuning. However, this type of method faces several challenges and remains underexplored in federated learning (FL), a widely-applied paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs collaboratively on private data across different users. FL mainly ensures privacy through secure aggregation (SA), which allows the server to aggregate updates while keeping clients' updates private. This mechanism preserves privacy but makes it difficult to identify which client trained on watermarked documents. In this work, we propose FedAttr, a new client-level attribution protocol for FL. FedAttr identifies which clients trained on watermarked data via a paired-subset-difference mechanism, while preserving the privacy guarantees of SA and FL performance. FedAttr proceeds in three steps: (i) estimate each client's update by differencing two SA queries, (ii) score the estimate with the watermark detector via differential scoring, and (iii) combine scores across rounds via Stouffer method. We theoretically show that FedAttr produces an unbiased estimator of each client's update with bounded mutual information leakage (i.e., O(d∗/N)O(d^*/N) per-round update). Moreover, FedAttr empirically achieves 100% TPR and 0% FPR, outperforming all baselines by at least 44.4% in TPR or 19.1% in FPR, with only 6.3% overhead relative to FL training time. Ablation studies confirm that FedAttr is robust to protocol parameters and configurations.
May 7, 2026

DataDignity: Training Data Attribution for Large Language Models

Auditing language-model outputs often requires more than judging correctness: an auditor may need to identify which source document most likely supports the knowledge expressed in a response. We study this as pinpoint provenance: given a prompt, a target-model response, and a candidate corpus, rank the documents that best support the response. We introduce FakeWiki, a controlled benchmark of 3,537 fabricated Wikipedia-style articles designed to preserve ground-truth provenance while weakening lexical shortcuts. FakeWiki includes QA probes, source-preserving paraphrases, retro-generated variants, hard anti-documents that remain topically similar while removing answer-critical facts, and five query conditions: clean prompting plus four jailbreak-inspired transformations. We evaluate seven retrieval baselines, a training-free activation-steering retrieval-fusion method, SteerFuse, and a supervised contrastive provenance ranker, ScoringModel. ScoringModel maps response and document features into a shared space and is trained with InfoNCE using in-batch, retrieval-mined, and anti-document negatives. Across nine open-weight instruction-tuned LLMs and five query conditions, ScoringModel improves mean Recall@10 from 35.0 for the strongest retrieval baseline to 52.2, without inference-time fusion, and wins 41/45 model-by-condition cells. SteerFuse is usually second-best despite requiring no supervised training, showing that activation-space evidence can efficiently complement text retrieval. On jailbreak-inspired transformed queries, ScoringModel improves Recall@10 by 15.7 points on average over the best baseline. Overall, our work shows that robust training data attribution requires evaluation settings that separate true answer support from topical or lexical resemblance.
May 6, 2026

From Parameter Dynamics to Risk Scoring : Quantifying Sample-Level Safety Degradation in LLM Fine-tuning

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is extremely fragile, as fine-tuning on a small number of benign samples can erase safety behaviors learned from millions of preference examples. Existing studies attempt to explain this phenomenon by comparing parameters and hidden states before and after fine-tuning, but overlook their dynamic evolution during fine-tuning. In this paper, we uncover a critical mechanism underlying safety degradation by analyzing parameter dynamics, where benign fine-tuning causes parameters to cumulatively drift toward danger-aligned directions, progressively undermining the model's safety. This finding suggests that samples contributing more to this drift has greater fine-tuning risks. Based on this insight, we propose a method of Sample-Level Quantification of Safety Degradation (SQSD), which quantifies the influence of each training sample on safety degradation. Specifically, SQSD computes continuous risk scores to samples by measuring their induced parameter updates' projection difference between danger and safety directions. Extensive experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate that SQSD effectively quantifies sample-level fine-tuning risks and exhibits strong transferability across model architectures, parameter scales, and parameter-efficient methods.
Apr 17, 2026

Sketching the Readout of Large Language Models for Scalable Data Attribution and Valuation

Data attribution and valuation are critical for understanding data-model synergy for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing gradient-based methods suffer from scalability challenges on LLMs. Inspired by human cognition, where decision making relies on a focused readout of relevant memories rather than replaying all pathways, we introduce RISE (Readout Influence Sketching Estimator). Instead of computing and indexing gradients across the entire LLM, RISE focuses on influence hotspots at the output layer, where influence signals concentrate, and the gradient admits a decomposed outer-product form. This enables a dual-channel representation combining a lexical residual channel (RH) and a semantic projected-error channel (GH). Applying CountSketch projections to these channels achieves strong compression while maintaining accurate attribution. Across the OLMo (1B-32B) and Pythia (14M-6.9B) families, RISE reduces index storage by up to 112×\times compared to RapidIn and scales to 32B parameters LLM, where gradient-based baselines such as RapidIn and ZO-Inf become memory-infeasible. We evaluate RISE on two paradigms: (1) retrospective attribution, retrieving influential training examples for specific predictions, and (2) prospective valuation, scoring candidate data utility zero-shot. We validate RISE on three tasks: Howdy backdoor data detection, Finance-Medical domain separation, and Brain Rot high-quality data selection. In a closed-loop Brain Rot study, continued pretraining on RISE-selected data yields consistent downstream improvements. Overall, RISE provides a practical and scalable primitive for influence analysis and training-data selection in modern large language models.
Apr 6, 2026

Data Attribution in Adaptive Learning

Machine learning models increasingly generate their own training data -- online bandits, reinforcement learning, and post-training pipelines for language models are leading examples. In these adaptive settings, a single training observation both updates the learner and shifts the distribution of future data the learner will collect. Standard attribution methods, designed for static datasets, ignore this feedback. We formalize occurrence-level attribution for finite-horizon adaptive learning via a conditional interventional target, prove that replay-side information cannot recover it in general, and identify a structural class in which the target is identified from logged data.
Apr 4, 2026

A Bayesian Information-Theoretic Approach to Data Attribution

Training Data Attribution (TDA) seeks to trace model predictions back to influential training examples, enhancing interpretability and safety. We formulate TDA as a Bayesian information-theoretic problem: subsets are scored by the information loss they induce - the entropy increase at a query when removed. This criterion credits examples for resolving predictive uncertainty rather than label noise. To scale to modern networks, we approximate information loss using a Gaussian Process surrogate built from tangent features. We show this aligns with classical influence scores for single-example attribution while promoting diversity for subsets. For even larger-scale retrieval, we relax to an information-gain objective and add a variance correction for scalable attribution in vector databases. Experiments show competitive performance on counterfactual sensitivity, ground-truth retrieval and coreset selection, showing that our method scales to modern architectures while bridging principled measures with practice.
Mar 18, 2026

DebugLM: Learning Traceable Training Data Provenance for LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are trained through multi-stage pipelines over heterogeneous data sources, yet developers lack a principled way to pinpoint the specific data responsible for an observed behavior. This lack of observability reduces debugging to reactive patching and makes failures prone to recur under distribution shift or subsequent model updates. To address this limitation, we propose DebugLM, a framework that equips LLMs with built-in data provenance, enabling them to explicitly trace the origins of their behaviors to specific training data sources. Specifically, the model learns to associate its responses with unique provenance tags that indicate the responsible dataset, empowering developers to precisely identify where undesirable behaviors are learned. Building on this capability, DebugLM further supports targeted test-time remediation, enabling developers to selectively trigger targeted refusal for specified data sources without retraining or modifying model parameters. Experiments demonstrate that DebugLM provides accurate behavior tracing in multi-stage training pipelines and effective test-time remediation while preserving the general utility of the model.
Mar 15, 2026

Gradient Atoms: Unsupervised Discovery, Attribution and Steering of Model Behaviors via Sparse Decomposition of Training Gradients

Training data attribution (TDA) methods ask which training documents are responsible for a model behavior. However, models often learn broad concepts shared across many examples. Moreover, existing TDA methods are supervised -- they require a predefined query behavior, then score every training document against it -- making them both expensive and unable to surface behaviors the user did not think to ask about. We present Gradient Atoms, an unsupervised method that decomposes per-document training gradients into sparse components ("atoms") via dictionary learning in a preconditioned eigenspace. Each atom captures a shared update direction induced by a cluster of functionally similar documents, directly recovering the collective structure that per-document methods do not address. Among 500 discovered atoms, the highest-coherence ones recover interpretable task-type behaviors -- refusal, arithmetic, yes/no classification, trivia QA -- without any behavioral labels. These atoms double as effective steering vectors: applying them as weight-space perturbations produces large, controllable shifts in model behavior (e.g., bulleted-list generation 33% to 94%; systematic refusal 50% to 0%). The method requires no query--document scoring stage, and scales independently of the number of query behaviors of interest. Code is available at https://github.com/jrosseruk/gradient_atoms.
Mar 4, 2026

Local Shapley: Model-Induced Locality and Optimal Reuse in Data Valuation

The Shapley value provides a principled foundation for data valuation, but exact computation is #P-hard due to the exponential coalition space. Existing accelerations remain global and ignore a structural property of modern predictors: for a given test instance, only a small subset of training points influences the prediction. We formalize this model-induced locality through support sets defined by the model's computational pathway (e.g., neighbors in KNN, leaves in trees, receptive fields in GNNs), showing that Shapley computation can be projected onto these supports without loss when locality is exact. This reframes Shapley evaluation as a structured data processing problem over overlapping support-induced subset families rather than exhaustive coalition enumeration. We prove that the intrinsic complexity of Local Shapley is governed by the number of distinct influential subsets, establishing an information-theoretic lower bound on retraining operations. Guided by this result, we propose LSMR (Local Shapley via Model Reuse), an optimal subset-centric algorithm that trains each influential subset exactly once via support mapping and pivot scheduling. For larger supports, we develop LSMR-A, a reuse-aware Monte Carlo estimator that remains unbiased with exponential concentration, with runtime determined by the number of distinct sampled subsets rather than total draws. Experiments across multiple model families demonstrate substantial retraining reductions and speedups while preserving high valuation fidelity.
Feb 16, 2026

Concept Influence: Leveraging Interpretability to Improve Performance and Efficiency in Training Data Attribution

As large language models are increasingly trained and fine-tuned, practitioners need methods to identify which training data drive specific behaviors, particularly unintended ones. Training Data Attribution (TDA) methods address this by estimating datapoint influence. Existing approaches like influence functions are both computationally expensive and attribute based on single test examples, which can bias results toward syntactic rather than semantic similarity. To address these issues of scalability and influence to abstract behavior, we leverage interpretable structures within the model during the attribution. First, we introduce Concept Influence which attribute model behavior to semantic directions (such as linear probes or sparse autoencoder features) rather than individual test examples. Second, we show that simple probe-based attribution methods are first-order approximations of Concept Influence that achieve comparable performance while being over an order-of-magnitude faster. We empirically validate Concept Influence and approximations across emergent misalignment benchmarks and real post-training datasets, and demonstrate they achieve comparable performance to classical influence functions while being substantially more scalable. More broadly, we show that incorporating interpretable structure within traditional TDA pipelines can enable more scalable, explainable, and better control of model behavior through data.
Jan 29, 2026

LoRIF: Pushing the Scalability Frontier of Training Data Attribution

Training data attribution (TDA) identifies which training examples most influenced a model's prediction. Influence function methods are a theoretically grounded family of TDA methods and exploit gradients. To overcome the scalability challenge arising from gradient computation, the most popular strategy is random projection (e.g., TRAK, LoGRA). However, this still faces two bottlenecks when scaling to large training sets and high-quality attribution: (i) storing and loading projected per-example gradients for all NN training examples, where query latency is dominated by I/O; and (ii) forming the D×DD \times D inverse Hessian approximation, which costs O(D2)O(D^2) memory. Both bottlenecks scale with the projection dimension DD, yet increasing DD is necessary for attribution quality -- creating a quality--scalability tradeoff. We introduce LoRIF (Low-Rank Influence Functions), which exploits low-rank structures of gradient to address both bottlenecks. First, we store rank-cc factors of projected per-example gradients rather than full matrices, reducing storage and query-time I/O from O(D)O(D) to O(cD)O(c\sqrt{D}) per layer per sample. Second, we use truncated SVD with the Woodbury identity to approximate the inverse Hessian term in an rr-dimensional subspace, reducing memory from O(D2)O(D^2) to O(Dr)O(Dr). On models from 0.1B to 70B parameters trained on datasets with millions of examples, LoRIF achieves up to 20×\times storage reduction and query-time speedup compared to LoGRA, while matching or exceeding its attribution quality. LoRIF makes gradient-based TDA practical at frontier scale. Code is available at https://github.com/doub7e/LoRIF.
Jan 13, 2026

Motion Attribution for Video Generation

Despite the rapid progress of video generation models, the role of data in influencing motion is poorly understood. We present Motive (MOTIon attribution for Video gEneration), a motion-centric, gradient-based data attribution framework that scales to modern, large, high-quality video datasets and models. We use this to study which fine-tuning clips improve or degrade temporal dynamics. Motive isolates temporal dynamics from static appearance via motion-weighted loss masks, yielding efficient and scalable motion-specific influence computation. On text-to-video models, Motive identifies clips that strongly affect motion and guides data curation that improves temporal consistency and physical plausibility. With Motive-selected high-influence data, our method improves both motion smoothness and dynamic degree on VBench, achieving a 74.1% human preference win rate compared with the pretrained base model. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to attribute motion rather than visual appearance in video generative models and to use it to curate fine-tuning data.
Aug 25, 2025

Speculating LLMs' Chinese Training Data Pollution from Their Tokens

Tokens are basic elements in the datasets for LLM training. It is well-known that many tokens representing Chinese phrases in the vocabulary of GPT (4o/4o-mini/o1/o3/4.5/4.1/o4-mini) are indicating contents like pornography or online gambling. Based on this observation, our goal is to locate Polluted Chinese (PoC) tokens in LLMs and study the relationship between PoC tokens' existence and training data. (1) We give a formal definition and taxonomy of PoC tokens based on the GPT's vocabulary. (2) We build a PoC token detector via fine-tuning an LLM to label PoC tokens in vocabularies by considering each token's both semantics and related contents from the search engines. (3) We study the speculation on the training data pollution via PoC tokens' appearances (token ID). Experiments on GPT and other 23 LLMs indicate that tokens widely exist while GPT's vocabulary behaves the worst: more than 40% long Chinese tokens (i.e., a token with more than two Chinese characters) are either porn or online gambling. We validate the accuracy of our speculation method on famous pre-training datasets like C4 and Pile. Then, considering GPT-4o, we speculate that the ratio of "Yui Hatano" related webpages in GPT-4o's training data is around 0.5%.
Jul 23, 2025

Are AI Coders Snitches? An Empirical Study of Pretraining Data Detection on Code Large Language Models

Recent advances in code large language models (CodeLLMs) have made them indispensable tools in modern software engineering. However, these models occasionally produce outputs that contain proprietary or sensitive code snippets, raising concerns about potential non-compliant use of training data, and posing risks to privacy and intellectual property. To ensure responsible and compliant deployment of CodeLLMs, training data detection (TDD) has become a critical task. While recent TDD methods have shown promise in natural language settings, their effectiveness on code data remains largely underexplored. This gap is particularly important given code's structured syntax and distinct similarity criteria compared to natural language. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study of seven state-of-the-art TDD methods on source code data, evaluating their performance across eight CodeLLMs. To support this evaluation, we introduce CodeSnitch, a function-level benchmark dataset comprising 9,000 code samples in three programming languages, each explicitly labeled as either included or excluded from CodeLLM training. Beyond evaluation on the original CodeSnitch, we design targeted mutation strategies to test the robustness of TDD methods under three distinct settings. These mutation strategies are grounded in the well-established Type-1 to Type-4 code clone detection taxonomy. Our study provides a systematic assessment of current TDD techniques for code and offers insights to guide the development of more effective and robust detection methods in the future.
Jun 12, 2025

GUARD: Guided Unlearning and Retention via Data Attribution for Large Language Models

Unlearning large language models (LLMs) is important due to copyright and privacy concerns. A key challenge is unintended forgetting, where removing data inadvertently impairs model utility. While prior work has focused on architectural innovations, the influence of data-level factors remains underexplored. We introduce GUARD, a framework for Guided Unlearning And Retention via Data Attribution. GUARD uses a lightweight proxy data attribution metric tailored to LLM unlearning, which efficiently quantifies the "alignment" between the Forget and Retain (or synthetic supplement) Sets. This metric leads to a new unlearning objective that assigns adaptive, nonuniform weights to samples, decaying exponentially with their proxy attribution scores, and thereby provably mitigates unintended retention loss. On the TOFU benchmark with a 10% forget set, applying GUARD to Gradient Ascent (GA) improves Retain Set ROUGE-L from 0.18 to 22.40 (a 124x increase) and Retain Probability from 0.06% to 17.50%, a substantial recovery from the GA collapse. Furthermore, GUARD combined with NPO (Negative Preference Optimization) outperforms Representation Misdirection for Unlearning (RMU) with 33.80% and 53.10% reductions in the Retain Set Sacrifice Rates computed from ROUGE-L and Probability (ρrρ_r and ρpρ_p), and a 16.01% improvement in knowledge retention on the MUSE NEWS Retain Set. These findings persist when attribution scores are computed using synthetic or highly subsampled (20%) Retain Sets, where NPO+GUARD still reduces ρrρ_r and ρpρ_p by up to 43.89% and 48.13% over NPO. Similar improvements are observed on MUSE, with a tolerable absolute privacy leakage degradation of 13.7 compared to the best-performing existing method in the privacy category.
Apr 30, 2024

Neural Dynamic Data Valuation via Stochastic State-Adjoint Trajectories

Classical data valuation defines a data point's value through the finite marginal contribution U(C∪{i})−U(C)U(C\cup\{i\})-U(C), but estimating this quantity over coalitions requires repeated training and does not describe the contribution made along a stochastic training path. We ask whether marginal contributions of data points can be estimated from one coupled trajectory while retaining a verifiable relation to coalition-based values. To this end, we introduce Neural Dynamic Data Valuation (NDDV), which models each data point as a controlled stochastic state and computes a first-order marginal-contribution score via the adjoint equation of the Stochastic Maximum Principle (SMP). This raw sensitivity is then calibrated by a mass-preserving redistribution that increases one data point's participation while redistributing the same total weight over the remaining data points. We prove that the resulting backward adjoint recursion is the exact reverse-mode adjoint of the frozen-aggregate Euler system, bound its discrepancy from the mean-field sensitivity, and express each finite coalition marginal as an integral of local sample-weight sensitivities. These results yield pair-specific error bounds and sufficient conditions for ordering agreement with Shapley, Banzhaf, and leave-one-out values. Experiments on existing benchmarks evaluate marginal-contribution fidelity, score-release cost, corrupted-sample detection, ablations, and failure regimes. NDDV is a one-run, trajectory-conditioned estimator, not an unconditional replacement for cooperative-game values.