Jan Miksa

Jan Miksa, Patryk Krukowski, Przemysław Spurek et al.

Machine unlearning has reached a critical bottleneck. As traditional weight-space interventions focus primarily on erasing targeted concepts, they often fail to prevent the unintended suppression of other significant representations. This leads to substantial collateral damage, with essential knowledge being forgotten, because these methods lack formal mathematical guarantees for the preservation of neutral concepts. To avoid degradation, they are frequently forced into conservative updates. We propose BARRIER (Bounded Activation Regions for Robust Information Erasure), a paradigm-shifting framework that shifts the locus of intervention from static model weights to the dynamic geometry of hidden-layer activations. Unlike existing methods, BARRIER employs Interval Arithmetic (IA) on SVD-based projections of the activation space to encapsulate the specific target region within a bounding hypercube. By driving unlearning updates exclusively within this forget interval and mathematically bounding the model response on the complement, we ensure rigorous protection of the retain distribution. This geometric construction transforms the preservation of knowledge from an empirical heuristic into a formal optimization target with a probabilistic tail bound on functional drift. Crucially, this stability permits highly aggressive unlearning updates within the forget region. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that BARRIER matches state-of-the-art trade-offs across classifiers and diffusion models, maximizing targeted concept erasure while safeguarding the integrity of all other representations. Our code is available at https://github.com/OneAndZero24/BARRIER.

Patryk Krukowski, Jan Miksa, Piotr Helm et al.

Continual learning is a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence that requires networks to acquire new knowledge while preserving previously learned representations. Despite the success of various approaches, most existing paradigms do not provide rigorous mathematical guarantees against catastrophic forgetting. Current methods that offer such guarantees primarily focus on analyzing the parameter space using \textit{interval arithmetic (IA)}, as seen in frameworks such as InterContiNet. However, restricting high-dimensional weight updates can be computationally expensive. In this work, we propose InTAct (Interval-based Task Activation Consolidation), a method that mitigates catastrophic forgetting by enforcing functional invariance at the neuron level. We identify specific activation intervals where previous tasks reside and constrain updates within these regions while allowing for flexible adaptation elsewhere. By ensuring that predictions remain stable within these nested activation intervals, we provide a tractable mathematical guarantee of functional invariance. We emphasize that regulating the activation space is significantly more efficient than parameter-based constraints, because the dimensionality of internal signals is much lower than that of the vast space of model weights. While our approach is architecture-agnostic and applicable to various continual learning settings, its integration with prompt-based methods enables it to achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks.