# Generative Model Unlearning: A Survey through Target Events, Unlearning Operators, and Evaluation Protocols

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19894/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision-language and text-to-image safety, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 109 of its 147 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Vision-language and text-to-image safety](https://mlsanity.com/safety/vision-language-and-text-to-image-safety/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 109)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07805/) (2020)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03817/) (2019)
- [Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13188/) (2023)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [TOFU: A Task of Fictitious Unlearning for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06121/) (2024)
- [Safe Latent Diffusion: Mitigating Inappropriate Degeneration in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05105/) (2022)
- [Negative Preference Optimization: From Catastrophic Collapse to Effective Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05868/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03023/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01504/) (2022)
- [TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11897/) (2023)
- [Unified Concept Editing in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14761/) (2023)
- [SalUn: Empowering Machine Unlearning via Gradient-based Weight Saliency in Both Image Classification and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12508/) (2023)
- [Who's Harry Potter? Approximate Unlearning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02238/) (2023)
- [Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13172/) (2023)
- [MACE: Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06135/) (2024)
- [PKU-SafeRLHF: Towards Multi-Level Safety Alignment for LLMs with Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15513/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SAEmnesia: Erasing Concepts in Diffusion Models with Supervised Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21379/) (2025)
- [MLUBench: A Benchmark for Lifelong Unlearning Evaluation in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12809/) (2026)
- [Look But Don't Touch with Sparse Autoencoders for Unlearning in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31699/) (2026)
- [Efficient Unlearning through Maximizing Relearning Convergence Delay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09391/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of generative models, privacy, copyright, safety, and reliability risks have attracted growing attention. To mitigate these risks, machine unlearning has been increasingly adapted from traditional classification models to generative settings. Despite notable progress, existing studies remain fragmented in their target definitions, unlearning mechanisms, and evaluation protocols, making objective comparison difficult across models, modalities, and applications. Moreover, modality-specific surveys often overlook the shared structure of Generative Model Unlearning (GenMU). To address this gap, we provide a comprehensive review of GenMU and formulate it as target-constrained distributional projection: given a target event, an unlearning operator transforms the generative distribution to suppress target-related outputs while preserving useful behavior and controlling operator cost. Under this framework, an unlearning request is specified by a target event, implemented through an unlearning operator, and assessed by empirical evidence over target suppression, distribution preservation, and operator cost. We further reorganize existing GenMU studies under this view. From this perspective, we provide the first explicit and unified account of how GenMU connects to mainstream applications, including privacy protection, copyright and style protection, safety alignment, hallucination mitigation, and deployment defense. Finally, we identify key open problems and future directions toward reliable, scalable, robust, and auditable GenMU. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at https://github.com/caxLee/GenMU-Survey.