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1,034篇论文匹配“Trustworthy Machine Learning”
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Deep Learning · Foundation Models

Suparna Bhattacharya, Tarun Kumar, Cong Xu, Satish Mopur, Jiahao Li, Ashish Mishra, Aalap Tripathy, ANNMARY KOOMTHANAM, Martin Foltin, Ian Foster

AI applications have shifted from single, mono-lithic foundation models (FM) to compound agentic systems. Yet today’s stacks remain fragmented: even as protocols (e.g., MCP, A2A) ease tool/agent connectivity, each framework embeds an implicit runtime for state, memory, budgets, and guardrails, making behavior non-portable and governance brittle. It mirrors computing before operating systems, when every program re-implemented basic services. This position paper argues that the field now needs a Foundation Model Operating System (FMOS): a system layer that virtualizes FM interactions analogous to how virtual machines abstract physical hardware, giving applications the illusion of dedicated, trustworthy FM instances with effectively unbounded capabilities. Internally, the FMOS orchestrates knowledge across memory tiers, model selection and resource allocation, and verification and policy enforcement. Like the human brain switching between fast intuition and slow deliberation, the FMOS learns when to intervene and when to let inference proceed directly and continuously adapting its policies based on operational experience.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Fengpeng Li, Kemou Li, Qizhou Wang, Bo Han, Jiantao Zhou

Concept erasure helps stop diffusion models (DMs) from generating harmful content; but current methods face robustness-retention trade-off. **Robustness** means the model fine-tuned by concept erasure methods resists reactivation of erased concepts, even under semantically related prompts. **Retention** means unrelated concepts are preserved so the model’s overall utility stays intact. Both are critical for concept erasure in practice, yet addressing them simultaneously is challenging, as existing works typically improve one factor while sacrificing the other. Prior work typically strengthens one while degrading the other—e.g., mapping a single erased prompt to a fixed safe target leaves class-level remnants exploitable by prompt attacks, whereas retention-oriented schemes underperform against adaptive adversaries. This paper introduces Adversarial Erasure with Gradient-Informed Synergy (AEGIS), a retention-data-free framework that advances both robustness and retention. First, AEGIS replaces handpicked targets with an Adversarial Erasure Target (AET) optimized to approximate the semantic center of the erased concept class. By aligning the model’s prediction on the erased prompt to an AET-derived target in the shared text–image space, AEGIS increases predicted-noise distances not just for the instance but for semantically related variants, substantially hardening the DMs against state-of-the-art adversarial prompt attacks. Second, AEGIS preserves utility without auxiliary data via Gradient Regularization Projection (GRP), a conflict-aware gradient rectification that selectively projects away the destructive component of the retention update only when it opposes the erasure direction. This directional, data-free projection mitigates interference between erasure and retention, avoiding dataset bias and accidental relearning. Extensive experiments show that AEGIS markedly reduces attack success rates across various concepts while maintaining or improving FID/CLIP versus advanced baselines, effectively pushing beyond the prevailing robustness–retention trade-off. The source code is in https://github.com/Feng-peng-Li/AEGIS.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Udari Sehwag, Shayan Shabihi, Alex McAvoy, Vikash Sehwag, Yuancheng Xu, Dalton towers, Furong Huang

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked concerns over their potential to acquire and misuse dangerous capabilities, posing frontier risks to society. Current safety evaluations primarily test for what a model *can* do—its capabilities—without assessing what it *would* do if endowed with high-risk capabilities. This leaves a critical blind spot: models may strategically conceal capabilities or rapidly acquire them, while harboring latent inclinations toward misuse. We argue that **propensity**—the likelihood of a model to pursue harmful actions if empowered—is a critical, yet underexplored, axis of safety evaluation. We present **PropensityBench**, a novel benchmark framework that assesses the proclivity of models to engage in risky behaviors when equipped with simulated dangerous capabilities using proxy tools. Our framework includes 5,874 scenarios with 6,648 tools spanning four high-risk domains: cybersecurity, self-proliferation, biosecurity, and chemical security. We simulate access to powerful capabilities via a controlled agentic environment and evaluate the models' choices under varying operational pressures that reflect real-world constraints or incentives models may encounter, such as resource scarcity or gaining more autonomy. Across open-source and proprietary frontier models, we uncover alarming signs of propensity: models frequently choose high-risk tools when under pressure, despite lacking the capability to execute such actions unaided. These findings call for a shift from static capability audits toward dynamic propensity assessments as a prerequisite for deploying frontier AI systems safely. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/scaleapi/propensity-evaluation.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Kemou Li, Qizhou Wang, Yue Wang, Fengpeng Li, Jun Liu, Bo Han, Jiantao Zhou

Large language models trained on vast corpora inherently risk memorizing sensitive or harmful content, which may later resurface in their outputs. Prevailing unlearning methods generally rely on gradient ascent and its variants to lower the probability of specific target responses. However, we find that this strategy induces a critical side effect: probability mass is redistributed into high-likelihood regions, often corresponding to semantically related rephrasings of the targets. We refer to this as the ***squeezing effect***, which explains why many methods yield merely spurious unlearning, a problem further obscured by automated metrics (e.g., ROUGE, truth ratio) that misreport actual success. To address this, we propose a ***bootstrapping*** (BS) framework that explicitly links the squeezing effect with the model’s own high-confidence generations, namely its ***model beliefs***. Since model beliefs inherently capture the very high-likelihood regions where probability mass is squeezed, incorporating them into the unlearning objective directly counters the squeezing effect. By jointly suppressing both target responses and model beliefs, BS-T (token) attenuates high-probability tokens, whereas BS-S (sequence) removes entire high-confidence generations, together achieving more thorough forgetting while preserving utility. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Jiaming Zhang, CHE WANG, Yang Cao, Longtao Huang, Wei Yang Bryan Lim

Multi-modal large reasoning models (MLRMs) pose significant privacy risks by inferring precise geographic locations from personal images through hierarchical chain-of-thought reasoning. Existing privacy protection techniques, primarily designed for perception-based models, prove ineffective against MLRMs' sophisticated multi-step reasoning processes that analyze environmental cues. We introduce **ReasonBreak**, a novel adversarial framework specifically designed to disrupt hierarchical reasoning in MLRMs through concept-aware perturbations. Our approach is founded on the key insight that effective disruption of geographic reasoning requires perturbations aligned with conceptual hierarchies rather than uniform noise. ReasonBreak strategically targets critical conceptual dependencies within reasoning chains, generating perturbations that invalidate specific inference steps and cascade through subsequent reasoning stages. To facilitate this approach, we contribute **GeoPrivacy-6K**, a comprehensive dataset comprising 6,341 ultra-high-resolution images ($\geq$2K) with hierarchical concept annotations. Extensive evaluation across seven state-of-the-art MLRMs (including GPT-o3, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro) demonstrates ReasonBreak's superior effectiveness, achieving a 14.4\% improvement in tract-level protection (33.8\% vs 19.4\%) and nearly doubling block-level protection (33.5\% vs 16.8\%). This work establishes a new paradigm for privacy protection against reasoning-based threats.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Zifan Peng, Yule Liu, Zhen Sun, Mingchen Li, Zeren Luo, Jingyi Zheng, Wenhan Dong, Xinlei He, Xuechao Wang, Yingjie Xue 等

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have made significant progress. While increasingly deployed in real-world applications, LALMs face growing safety risks from jailbreak attacks that bypass safety alignment. However, there remains a lack of an adversarial audio dataset and a unified framework specifically designed to evaluate and compare jailbreak attacks against them. To address this gap, we introduce JALMBench, a comprehensive benchmark that assesses LALM safety against jailbreak attacks, comprising 11,316 text samples and 245,355 audio samples (>1,000 hours). JALMBench supports 12 mainstream LALMs, 8 attack methods (4 text-transferred and 4 audio-originated), and 5 defenses. We conduct in-depth analysis on attack efficiency, topic sensitivity, voice diversity, and model architecture. Additionally, we explore mitigation strategies for the attacks at both the prompt and response levels. Our systematic evaluation reveals that LALMs' safety is strongly influenced by modality and architectural choices: text-based safety alignment can partially transfer to audio inputs, and interleaved audio-text strategies enable more robust cross-modal generalization. Existing general-purpose moderation methods only slightly improve security, highlighting the need for defense methods specifically designed for LALMs. We hope our work can shed light on the design principles for building more robust LALMs.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Yifan Zhu, Yibo Miao, Yinpeng Dong, XIAOSHAN GAO

The volume of freely scraped data on the Internet has driven the tremendous success of deep learning. Along with this comes the rising concern about data privacy and security. Numerous methods for generating unlearnable examples have been proposed to prevent data from being illicitly learned by unauthorized deep models by impeding generalization. However, the existing approaches primarily rely on empirical heuristics, making it challenging to enhance unlearnable examples with solid explanations. In this paper, we analyze and improve unlearnable examples from a novel perspective: mutual information reduction. We demonstrate that effective unlearnable examples always decrease mutual information between clean features and poisoned features, and when the network gets deeper, the unlearnability goes better together with lower mutual information. Further, we prove from a covariance reduction perspective that minimizing the conditional covariance of intra-class poisoned features reduces the mutual information between distributions. Based on the theoretical results, we propose a novel unlearnable method called Mutual Information Unlearnable Examples (MI-UE) that reduces covariance by maximizing the cosine similarity among intra-class features, thus impeding the generalization effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, even under defense mechanisms.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Zhixian Wang, Zhanhao Hu, David Wagner

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with safety alignment to prevent generating malicious content. Although some attacks have highlighted vulnerabilities in these safety-aligned LLMs, they typically have limitations, such as necessitating access to the model weights or the generation process. Since proprietary models through API-calling do not grant users such permissions, these attacks find it challenging to compromise them. In this paper, we propose Jailbreaking Using LLM Introspection (JULI), which jailbreaks LLMs by manipulating the token log probabilities, using a tiny plug-in block, BiasNet. JULI relies solely on the knowledge of the target LLM's predicted token log probabilities. It can effectively jailbreak API-calling LLMs under a black-box setting and knowing only top-$5$ token log probabilities. Our approach demonstrates superior effectiveness, outperforming existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches across multiple metrics.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Casey Barkan, Sidney Black, Oliver Sourbut

We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can predict whether they will succeed on a given task and whether their predictions improve as they progress through multi-step tasks. We also investigate whether LLMs can learn from in-context experiences to make better decisions about whether to pursue a task in scenarios where failure is costly. All LLMs we tested are overconfident, but most predict their success with better-than-random discriminatory power. We find that newer and larger LLMs generally do not have greater discriminatory power, though Claude models do show such a trend. On multi-step agentic tasks, the overconfidence of several frontier LLMs worsens as they progress through the tasks, and reasoning LLMs perform comparably to or worse than non-reasoning LLMs. With in-context experiences of failure, some but not all LLMs reduce their overconfidence leading to significantly improved decision making, while others do not. Interestingly, all LLMs’ decisions are approximately rational given their estimated probabilities of success, yet their overly-optimistic estimates result in poor decision making. These results suggest that current LLM agents are hindered by their lack of awareness of their own capabilities. We discuss the implications of LLMs' awareness of their capabilities for AI misuse and misalignment risks.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Zhengyao Song, Meixi Zheng, Ke Xu, Yongqiang Li, Baoyuan Wu

CLIP, known for its strong semantic matching capabilities derived from large-scale pretraining, has been shown to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks in prior work. In this work, we find that such attacks leave a detectable trace. This trace manifests as a divergence in how image features align with the CLIP's text manifold where semantically similar texts cluster. Specifically, benign images exhibit *deep benign matching*, where their features are close not only to the predicted text caption but also to the broader manifold of semantically equivalent variants of that caption. In contrast, poisoned images display *shallow malicious matching*, where their features shallowly align with the specific target caption but remain distant from its semantic neighborhood. Leveraging this insight, we propose **Subspace Detection**, a novel test-time poisoned image detection method against backdoored CLIP. First, for a test image, we approximate its corresponding local text manifold by constructing a low-dimensional subspace from semantically equivalent variants of its predicted text. Second, within this broad subspace, we probe a region-of-interest that maximally amplifies the separation between the two types of images: benign images remain close due to deep matching, while poisoned images deviate significantly due to shallow matching. Finally, we identify whether the test image is poisoned by measuring its deviation from this region; a large deviation indicates a poisoned image. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing detection methods against SoTA backdoor attacks and exhibits robust detection performance across multiple downstream datasets.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Chenwang Wu, Yiu-ming Cheung, Shuhai Zhang, Bo Han, Defu Lian

While machine-generated texts (MGTs) offer great convenience, they also pose risks such as disinformation and phishing, highlighting the need for reliable detection. Metric-based methods, which extract statistically distinguishable features of MGTs, are often more practical than complex model-based methods that are prone to overfitting. Given their diverse designs, we first place representative metric-based methods within a unified framework, enabling a clear assessment of their advantages and limitations. Our analysis identifies a core challenge across these methods: the token-level detection score is easily biased by the inherent randomness of the MGTs generation process. To address this, we theoretically and empirically reveal two relationships of context detection scores that may aid calibration: Neighbor Similarity and Initial Instability. We then propose a Markov-informed score calibration strategy that models these relationships using Markov random fields, and implements it as a lightweight component via a mean-field approximation, allowing our method to be seamlessly integrated into existing detectors. Extensive experiments in various real-world scenarios, such as cross-LLM and paraphrasing attacks, demonstrate significant gains over baselines with negligible computational overhead. The code is available at \url{ https://github.com/tmlr-group/MRF_Calibration}.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Jianwei Li, Jung-Eun Kim

Backdoor attacks pose severe security threats to large language models (LLMs), where a model behaves normally under benign inputs but produces malicious outputs when a hidden trigger appears. Existing backdoor removal methods typically assume prior knowledge of triggers, access to a clean reference model, or rely on aggressive finetuning configurations, and are often limited to classification tasks. However, such assumptions fall apart in real-world generative LLM settings. In this work, we propose a new framework for purifying **generative LLM** without any prior trigger knowledge or clean references. Through systematic sanity checks, we find that backdoor associations are redundantly encoded across MLP layers, while attention modules primarily amplify trigger signals without establishing the behavior. Leveraging this insight, we shift the focus from isolating specific backdoor triggers to cutting off the trigger–behavior associations, and design an immunization-inspired elimination approach: by constructing multiple synthetic backdoored variants of the given suspicious model, each trained with different malicious trigger–behavior pairs, and contrasting them with their clean counterparts. The recurring modifications across variants reveal a shared **"backdoor signature"**—analogous to antigens in a virus. Guided by this signature, we neutralize highly suspicious components in LLM and apply lightweight finetuning to restore its fluency, producing purified models that withstand diverse backdoor attacks and threat models while preserving generative capability.

Reinforcement Learning · Multi-agent

Ido Levy, Ben wiesel, Sami Marreed, Alon Oved, Avi Yaeli, Segev Shlomov

Autonomous web agents solve complex browsing tasks, yet existing benchmarks measure only whether an agent finishes a task, ignoring whether it does so safely or in a way enterprises can trust. To integrate these agents into critical workflows, safety and trustworthiness (ST) are prerequisite conditions for adoption. We introduce ST-WebAgentBench, a configurable and extensible framework designed as a first step toward enterprise-grade evaluation. Each of its 375 tasks carries one or more ST policies (3,057 in total), concise rules encoding constraints, and is scored along six orthogonal dimensions (e.g., user consent, robustness). Tasks span three difficulty tiers for fine-grained capability profiling, and a “Modality Challenge” disentangles vision-only from DOM-only information retrieval, isolating the contribution of each perceptual modality to agent failures. Beyond raw task success, we propose the Completion Under Policy (CuP) metric, which credits only completions that respect all applicable policies, and the Risk Ratio, which quantifies ST breaches across dimensions. Evaluating three open state-of-the-art agents shows their average CuP is less than two-thirds of their nominal completion rate, revealing substantial safety gaps. To support growth and adaptation to new domains, ST-WebAgentBench provides modular code and extensible templates that enable new workflows to be incorporated with minimal effort, offering a practical foundation for advancing trustworthy web agents at scale.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Yingjie Ma, Bijal Bharadva, Xin Zhang, Joann Qiongna Chen

Human mobility trajectory data supports a wide range of applications, including urban planning, intelligent transportation systems, and public safety monitoring. However, large-scale, high-quality mobility datasets are difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Raw trajectory data may reveal sensitive user information, such as home addresses, routines, or social relationships, making it crucial to develop privacy-preserving alternatives. Recent advances in deep generative modeling have enabled synthetic trajectory generation, but existing methods either lack formal privacy guarantees or suffer from reduced utility and scalability. Differential Privacy (DP) has emerged as a rigorous framework for data protection, and recent efforts such as PATE-GAN and \textsc{PateGail} integrate DP with generative adversarial learning. While promising, these methods struggle to generalize across diverse trajectory patterns and often incur significant utility degradation. In this work, we propose a new framework that builds on \textsc{PateGail\texttt{++}} by introducing a \emph{sensitivity-aware noise injection module} that dynamically adjusts privacy noise based on sample-level sensitivity. This design significantly improves trajectory fidelity, downstream task performance, and scalability under strong privacy guarantees. We further adapt our framework to the local differential privacy (LDP) setting, allowing individual-level protection without reliance on a trusted server. We evaluate our method on a real-world mobility dataset and demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of privacy-utility trade-off.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Rishi Jha, Harold Triedman, Justin Wagle, Vitaly Shmatikov

Control-flow hijacking attacks manipulate orchestration mechanisms in multi-agent systems into performing unsafe actions that compromise the system and exfiltrate sensitive information. Recently proposed defenses, such as LlamaFirewall, rely on alignment checks of inter-agent communications to ensure that all agent invocations are "related to" and "likely to further" the original objective. We start by demonstrating control-flow hijacking attacks that evade these defenses even if alignment checks are performed by advanced LLMs. We argue that the safety and functionality objectives of multi-agent systems fundamentally conflict with each other. This conflict is exacerbated by the brittle definitions of "alignment" and the checkers' incomplete visibility into the execution context. We then propose, implement, and evaluate ControlValve, a new defense based on the principles of control-flow integrity and least privilege. ControlValve (1) generates permitted control-flow graphs for multi-agent systems, and (2) enforces that all executions comply with these graphs, along with contextual rules (generated in a zero-shot manner) for each agent invocation.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Liancheng Fang, Aiwei Liu, Henry Peng Zou, Yankai Chen, Hengrui Zhang, Zhongfen Deng, Philip Yu

We introduce MUSE, a novel watermarking paradigm for tabular generative models. Existing approaches often exploit DDIM invertibility to watermark tabular diffusion models, but tabular diffusion models suffer from poor invertibility, leading to degraded performance. To overcome this limitation, we leverage the computational efficiency of tabular generative models and propose a multi-sample selection paradigm, where watermarks are embedded by generating multiple candidate samples and selecting one according to a specialized scoring function. The key advantages of MUSE include (1) Model-agnostic: compatible with any tabular generative model that supports repeated sampling; (2) Flexible: offers flexible designs to navigate the trade-off between generation quality, detectability, and robustness; (3) Calibratable: theoretical analysis provides principled calibration of watermarking strength, ensuring minimal distortion to the original data distribution. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that MUSE substantially outperforms existing methods. Notably, it reduces the distortion rates by 84-88% for fidelity metrics compared with the best performing baselines, while achieving 1.0 TPR@0.1%FPR detection rate.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Tran Huynh, Ruoxi Jia

Safety preferences are inherently subjective, yet current LLM safety alignment methods often impose universal standards that fail to account for individual sensitivities. In this work, we propose an efficient, training-free method for personalized safety control via inference-time activation intervention. Our approach steers internal representations to suppress user-specific undesired content while preserving model utility. We systematically evaluate three strategies for estimating intervention directions: Instance-Level Contrast Shift (ILCS), Unpaired Mean Shift (UMS), and our primary method, Paired Contrast Mean Shift (PCMS). We provide theoretical insights into each approach and highlight the advantages of PCMS. Empirical results across diverse open-weight models demonstrate that our method effectively reduces undesired content in line with individual preferences, with minimal impact on helpfulness—enabling more adaptive and user-aligned LLM behavior.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Ismail Lamaakal, Chaymae Yahyati, Khalid Makkaoui, Ibrahim Ouahbi, Yassine Maleh

Reliable uncertainty estimation is a key missing piece for on-device monitoring in TinyML: microcontrollers must detect failures, distribution shift, or accuracy drops under strict flash/latency budgets, yet common uncertainty approaches (deep ensembles, MC dropout, early exits, temporal buffering) typically require multiple passes, extra branches, or state that is impractical on milliwatt hardware. This paper proposes a novel and practical method, SNAP-UQ, for single-pass, label-free uncertainty estimation based on depth-wise next-activation prediction. SNAP-UQ taps a small set of backbone layers and uses tiny int8 heads to predict the mean and scale of the next activation from a low-rank projection of the previous one; the resulting standardized prediction error forms a depth-wise surprisal signal that is aggregated and mapped through a lightweight monotone calibrator into an actionable uncertainty score. The design introduces no temporal buffers or auxiliary exits and preserves state-free inference, while increasing deployment footprint by only a few tens of kilobytes. Across vision and audio backbones, SNAP-UQ reduces flash and latency relative to early-exit and deep-ensemble baselines (typically $\sim$40--60% smaller and $\sim$25--35% faster), with several competing methods at similar accuracy often exceeding MCU memory limits. On corrupted streams, it improves accuracy-drop event detection by multiple AUPRC points and maintains strong failure detection (AUROC $\approx 0.9$) in a single forward pass. By grounding uncertainty in layer-to-layer dynamics rather than solely in output confidence, SNAP-UQ offers a novel, resource-efficient basis for robust TinyML monitoring. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ism-ail11/SNAP-UQ

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Nay Myat Min, Long H. Pham, Yige Li, Jun Sun

Large language models (LLMs) can exhibit *concept-conditioned semantic divergence*: common high-level cues (e.g., ideologies, public figures) elicit unusually uniform, stance-like responses that evade token-trigger audits. This behavior falls in a blind spot of current safety evaluations, yet carries major societal stakes, as such concept cues can steer content exposure at scale. We formalize this phenomenon and present **RAVEN** (**R**esponse **A**nomaly **V**igilance), a black-box audit that flags cases where a model is simultaneously highly certain and atypical among peers by coupling *semantic entropy* over paraphrastic samples with *cross-model disagreement*. In a controlled LoRA fine-tuning study, we implant a concept-conditioned stance using a small biased corpus, demonstrating feasibility without rare token triggers. Auditing five LLM families across twelve sensitive topics (360 prompts per model) and clustering via bidirectional entailment, RAVEN surfaces recurrent, model-specific divergences in 9/12 topics. Concept-level audits complement token-level defenses and provide a practical early-warning signal for release evaluation and post-deployment monitoring against propaganda-like influence.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Keivan Rezaei, Mehrdad Saberi, Abhilasha Ravichander, Soheil Feizi

Large language models are trained on massive corpora of web data, which may include private data, copyrighted material, factually inaccurate data, or data that degrades model performance. Eliminating the influence of such problematic datapoints on a model through complete retraining---by repeatedly pretraining the model on datasets that exclude these specific instances---is computationally prohibitive. To address this, unlearning algorithms have been proposed, that aim to eliminate the influence of particular datapoints at a low computational cost, while leaving the rest of the model intact. However, precisely unlearning the influence of data on a large language model has proven to be a major challenge. In this work, we propose a new algorithm, MSA (**M**odel **S**tate **A**rithmetic), for unlearning datapoints in large language models. MSA utilizes prior model checkpoints--- artifacts that record model states at different stages of pretraining--- to estimate and counteract the effect of targeted datapoints. Our experimental results show that MSA achieves competitive performance and often outperforms existing machine unlearning algorithms across multiple benchmarks, models, and evaluation metrics, suggesting that MSA could be an effective approach towards more flexible large language models that are capable of data erasure.