Hadi Amiri

Nidhi Vakil, Hadi Amiri

We present a generic and trend-aware curriculum learning approach for graph neural networks. It extends existing approaches by incorporating sample-level loss trends to better discriminate easier from harder samples and schedule them for training. The model effectively integrates textual and structural information for relation extraction in text graphs. Experimental results show that the model provides robust estimations of sample difficulty and shows sizable improvement over the state-of-the-art approaches across several datasets.

Jiali Cheng, Hadi Amiri

Machine Unlearning removes specific knowledge about training data samples from an already trained model. It has significant practical benefits, such as purging private, inaccurate, or outdated information from trained models without the need for complete re-training. Unlearning within a multimodal setting presents unique challenges due to the complex dependencies between different data modalities and the expensive cost of training on large multimodal datasets and architectures. This paper presents the first machine unlearning approach for multimodal data and models, titled MultiDelete, which is designed to decouple associations between unimodal data points during unlearning without losing the overall representation strength of the trained model. MultiDelete advocates for three key properties for effective multimodal unlearning: (a): modality decoupling, which effectively decouples the association between individual unimodal data points marked for deletion, rendering them as unrelated data points, (b): multimodal knowledge retention, which retains the multimodal representation post-unlearning, and (c): unimodal knowledge retention, which retains the unimodal representation postunlearning. MultiDelete is efficient to train and is not constrained by using a strongly convex loss -- a common restriction among existing baselines. Experiments on two architectures and four datasets, including image-text and graph-text datasets, show that MultiDelete gains an average improvement of 17.6 points over best performing baseline in unlearning multimodal samples, can maintain the multimodal and unimodal knowledge of the original model post unlearning, and can provide better protection to unlearned data against adversarial attacks.

Mohamed Elgaar, Hadi Amiri

We employ a characterization of linguistic complexity from psycholinguistic and language acquisition research to develop data-driven curricula to understand the underlying linguistic knowledge that models learn to address NLP tasks. The novelty of our approach is in the development of linguistic curricula derived from data, existing knowledge about linguistic complexity, and model behavior during training. By analyzing several benchmark NLP datasets, our curriculum learning approaches identify sets of linguistic metrics (indices) that inform the challenges and reasoning required to address each task. Our work will inform future research in all NLP areas, allowing linguistic complexity to be considered early in the research and development process. In addition, our work prompts an examination of gold standards and fair evaluation in NLP.

Nidhi Vakil, Hadi Amiri

A curriculum is a planned sequence of learning materials and an effective one can make learning efficient and effective for both humans and machines. Recent studies developed effective data-driven curriculum learning approaches for training graph neural networks in language applications. However, existing curriculum learning approaches often employ a single criterion of difficulty in their training paradigms. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on curriculum learning by introducing a novel approach that builds on graph complexity formalisms (as difficulty criteria) and model competence during training. The model consists of a scheduling scheme which derives effective curricula by accounting for different views of sample difficulty and model competence during training. The proposed solution advances existing research in curriculum learning for graph neural networks with the ability to incorporate a fine-grained spectrum of graph difficulty criteria in their training paradigms. Experimental results on real-world link prediction and node classification tasks illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Nidhi Vakil, Hadi Amiri

Curriculum learning provides a systematic approach to training. It refines training progressively, tailors training to task requirements, and improves generalization through exposure to diverse examples. We present a curriculum learning approach that builds on existing knowledge about text and graph complexity formalisms for training with text graph data. The core part of our approach is a novel data scheduler, which employs "spaced repetition" and complexity formalisms to guide the training process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on several text graph tasks and graph neural network architectures. The proposed model gains more and uses less data; consistently prefers text over graph complexity indices throughout training, while the best curricula derived from text and graph complexity indices are equally effective; and it learns transferable curricula across GNN models and datasets. In addition, we find that both node-level (local) and graph-level (global) graph complexity indices, as well as shallow and traditional text complexity indices play a crucial role in effective curriculum learning.

Mohamed Elgaar, Hadi Amiri

Curriculum learning changes the order of pre-training data, but it remains unclear whether it changes the learning trajectory or mainly reorders exposure over a fixed trajectory. We train Pythia models (14M-410M parameters) for 300B tokens under three linguistically motivated curricula-Age-of-Acquisition, word frequency, and Verb Variation (VV)-and compare each against Random ordering; at 1B parameters we compare Random and VV. Across orderings, training follows a shared sequence of latent phases, while curricula mainly change within-phase data exposure. In smaller models (up to 160M parameters), Random ordering exhibits higher gradient noise and stronger late-training output-head spectral saturation, alongside lower final accuracy; curricula reduce both effects at matched compute. At larger scales, saturation differences are smaller and curriculum gains shrink. We formalize the link between difficulty pacing and optimization stability in an idealized analysis based on gradient-variance control, and our results point to a practical takeaway: curricula help by stabilizing within-phase optimization rather than by creating new phases.

Jiali Cheng, Hadi Amiri

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are often trained on datasets of query-response pairs, which embed the ability to use tools or APIs directly into the parametric knowledge of LLMs. Tool-augmented LLMs need the ability to forget learned tools due to security vulnerabilities, privacy regulations, or tool deprecations. However, ``tool unlearning'' has not been investigated in unlearning literature. We introduce this novel task, which requires addressing distinct challenges compared to traditional unlearning: knowledge removal rather than forgetting individual samples, the high cost of optimizing LLMs, and the need for principled evaluation metrics. To bridge these gaps, we propose ToolDelete, the first approach for unlearning tools from tool-augmented LLMs. It implements three key properties to address the above challenges for effective tool unlearning and introduces a new membership inference attack (MIA) model for effective evaluation. Extensive experiments on multiple tool learning datasets and tool-augmented LLMs show that ToolDelete effectively unlearns randomly selected tools, while preserving the LLM's knowledge on non-deleted tools and maintaining performance on general tasks.

Jiali Cheng, Hadi Amiri

Machine Unlearning aims to remove undesired information from trained models without requiring full retraining from scratch. Despite recent advancements, their underlying loss landscapes and optimization dynamics received less attention. In this paper, we investigate and analyze machine unlearning through the lens of mode connectivity - the phenomenon where independently trained models can be connected by smooth low-loss paths in the parameter space. We define and study mode connectivity in unlearning across a range of overlooked conditions, including connections between different unlearning methods, models trained with and without curriculum learning, and models optimized with first-order and secondorder techniques. Our findings show distinct patterns of fluctuation of different evaluation metrics along the curve, as well as the mechanistic (dis)similarity between unlearning methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on mode connectivity in the context of machine unlearning.

Jiali Cheng, Hadi Amiri

We introduce machine unlearning for speech tasks, a novel and underexplored research problem that aims to efficiently and effectively remove the influence of specific data from trained speech models without full retraining. This has important applications in privacy preservation, removal of outdated or noisy data, and bias mitigation. While machine unlearning has been studied in computer vision and natural language processing, its application to speech is largely unexplored due to the high-dimensional, sequential, and speaker-dependent nature of speech data. We define two fundamental speech unlearning tasks: sample unlearning, which removes individual data points (e.g., a voice recording), and class unlearning, which removes an entire category (e.g., all data from a speaker), while preserving performance on the remaining data. Experiments on keyword spotting and speaker identification demonstrate that unlearning speech data is significantly more challenging than unlearning image or text data. We conclude with key future directions in this area, including structured training, robust evaluation, feature-level unlearning, broader applications, scalable methods, and adversarial robustness.

Mohamed Elgaar, Hadi Amiri

We present a novel approach to paraphrase generation that enables precise control and fine-tuning of 40 linguistic attributes for English. Our model is an encoder-decoder architecture that takes as input a source sentence and desired linguistic attributes, and produces paraphrases of the source that satisfy the desired attributes. To guarantee high-quality outputs at inference time, our method is equipped with a quality control mechanism that gradually adjusts the embedding of linguistic attributes to find the nearest and most attainable configuration of desired attributes for paraphrase generation. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method by comparing it to recent controllable generation models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms baselines in generating paraphrases that satisfy desired linguistic attributes.

Jiali Cheng, Hadi Amiri

Recent advancements in Machine Unlearning (MU) have introduced solutions to selectively remove certain training samples, such as those with outdated or sensitive information, from trained models. Despite these advancements, evaluation of MU methods have been inconsistent, employing different trained models and architectures, and sample removal strategies, which hampers accurate comparison. In addition, prior MU approaches have mainly focused on singular tasks or modalities, which is not comprehensive. To address these limitations, we develop MU-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark for MU that (i) unifies the sets of deleted samples and trained models, and (ii) provides broad coverage of tasks and data modalities, including previously unexplored domains such as speech and video classification. Our evaluation show that RandLabel and SalUn are the most effective general MU approaches on MU-Bench, and BadT and SCRUB are capable of achieving random performance on the deletion set. We analyze several under-investigated aspects of unlearning, including scalability, the impacts of parameter-efficient fine-tuning and curriculum learning, and susceptibility to dataset biases. MU-Bench provides an easy-to-use package that includes dataset splits, models, and implementations, together with a leader board to enable unified and scalable MU research.