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Jacob Block

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2 papers

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Machine Unlearning under Overparameterization

Jacob Block
Aryan Mokhtari
Sanjay Shakkottai

Machine unlearning algorithms aim to remove the influence of specific training samples, ideally recovering the model that would have resulted from training on the remaining data alone. We study unlearning in the overparameterized setting, where many models interpolate the data, and defining the solution as any loss minimizer over the retained set—as in prior work in the underparameterized setting—is inadequate, since the original model may already interpolate the retained data and satisfy this condition. In this regime, loss gradients vanish, rendering prior methods based on gradient perturbations ineffective, motivating both new unlearning definitions and algorithms. For this setting, we define the unlearning solution as the minimum-complexity interpolator over the retained data and propose a new algorithmic framework that only requires access to model gradients on the retained set at the original solution. We minimize a regularized objective over perturbations constrained to be orthogonal to these model gradients, a first-order relaxation of the interpolation condition. For different model classes, we provide exact and approximate unlearning guarantees and demonstrate that an implementation of our framework outperforms existing baselines across various unlearning experiments.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Provable Meta-Learning with Low-Rank Adaptations

Jacob Block
Sundararajan Srinivasan
Liam Collins
Aryan Mokhtari
Sanjay Shakkottai

The power of foundation models (FMs) lies in their capacity to learn highly expressive representations that can be adapted to a broad spectrum of tasks. However, these pretrained models require additional training stages to become effective for downstream applications. In the multi-task setting, prior works have shown empirically that specific meta-learning approaches for preparing a model for future adaptation through parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) can outperform standard retraining methods, but the mechanism of the benefits of meta-learning has been largely unexplored. We introduce a framework for generic PEFT-based meta-learning to learn a model that can easily adapt to unseen tasks. For linear models using LoRA, we show that standard retraining is provably suboptimal for finding an adaptable set of parameters and provide strict performance guarantees for our proposed method. We verify these theoretical insights through experiments on synthetic data as well as real-data vision and language tasks. We observe significant performance benefits using a simple implementation of our proposed meta-learning scheme during retraining relative to the conventional approach.

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