# Black-Box Forgetting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00409 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00409/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09601/) (2017)
- [Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03817/) (2019)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Net: Selective Forgetting in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04933/) (2019)
- [Certified Data Removal from Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03030/) (2019)
- [Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12340/) (2019)
- [The CMA Evolution Strategy: A Tutorial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00772/) (2016)
- [Remember What You Want to Forget: Algorithms for Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03279/) (2021)
- [Amnesiac Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10981/) (2020)
- [MACE: Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06135/) (2024)
- [Forget-Me-Not: Learning to Forget in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17591/) (2023)
- [Towards Unbounded Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09880/) (2023)
- [Black-Box Tuning for Language-Model-as-a-Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03514/) (2022)
- [Fast Yet Effective Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08947/) (2021)
- [Forgetting Outside the Box: Scrubbing Deep Networks of Information Accessible from Input-Output Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02960/) (2020)
- [Selective Amnesia: A Continual Learning Approach to Forgetting in Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10120/) (2023)
- [Mixed-Privacy Forgetting in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13431/) (2020)
- [Black-box Prompt Learning for Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08531/) (2022)
- [BlackVIP: Black-Box Visual Prompting for Robust Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14773/) (2023)
- [BBTv2: Towards a Gradient-Free Future with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11200/) (2022)
- [Black Box Few-Shot Adaptation for Vision-Language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01752/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Agents Are All You Need for LLM Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00406/) (2025)
- [Approximate Domain Unlearning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08132/) (2025)
- [Black-Box Continual Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22999/) (2026)
- [Not All Patches Are Equally Forgettable: Spatially Localized Domain Unlearning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17790/) (2026)
- [Open Vocabulary Domain Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31356/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) provide remarkable zero-shot classification capability covering a wide variety of object classes. However, practical applications do not always require the classification of all kinds of objects, and leaving the model capable of recognizing unnecessary classes not only degrades overall accuracy but also leads to operational disadvantages. To mitigate this issue, we explore the selective forgetting problem for PTMs, where the task is to make the model unable to recognize only the specified classes while maintaining accuracy for the rest. All the existing methods assume "white-box" settings, where model information such as architectures, parameters, and gradients is available for training. However, PTMs are often "black-box," where information on such models is unavailable for commercial reasons or social responsibilities. In this paper, we address a novel problem of selective forgetting for black-box models, named Black-Box Forgetting, and propose an approach to the problem. Given that information on the model is unavailable, we optimize the input prompt to decrease the accuracy of specified classes through derivative-free optimization. To avoid difficult high-dimensional optimization while ensuring high forgetting performance, we propose Latent Context Sharing, which introduces common low-dimensional latent components among multiple tokens for the prompt. Experiments on four standard benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method with reasonable baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yusukekwn/Black-Box-Forgetting.