Zhuan Shi

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Supervisor

Golnoosh Farnadi

Research Topics

AI Safety

Diffusion Models

Federated Learning

Generative Models

Unlearning

Publications

Multilingual Amnesia: On the Transferability of Unlearning in Multilingual LLMs

Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah

As multilingual large language models become more widely used, ensuring their safety and fairness across diverse linguistic contexts present… (see more)s unique challenges. While existing research on machine unlearning has primarily focused on monolingual settings, typically English, multilingual environments introduce additional complexities due to cross-lingual knowledge transfer and biases embedded in both pretraining and fine-tuning data. In this work, we study multilingual unlearning using the Aya-Expanse 8B model under two settings: (1) data unlearning and (2) concept unlearning. We extend benchmarks for factual knowledge and stereotypes to ten languages through translation: English, French, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Farsi, Korean, Hindi, Hebrew, and Indonesian. These languages span five language families and a wide range of resource levels. Our experiments show that unlearning in high-resource languages is generally more stable, with asymmetric transfer effects observed between typologically related languages. Furthermore, our analysis of linguistic distances indicates that syntactic similarity is the strongest predictor of cross-lingual unlearning behavior.

2026-01-08

arXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Localized-Attention-Guided Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Zhuan Shi

Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah

Rik de Vries

Golnoosh Farnadi

2025-09-23

NeurIPS.cc/2025/Workshop/GenProCC (published)

openreview.net