Selective Capability Unlearning in End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding
2606.24063

Authors

Akanksha Singh,Vinod Kumar Kurmi

Abstract

Modern spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, where specific functionalities may need to be removed due to policy or safety constraints. In SLU, a functionality corresponds to an intent and its associated slot-generation behavior.

However, in autoregressive models, suppressing a target intent does not eliminate the conditional mapping that generates slots conditioned on that intent. When the intent prefix is externally supplied, the model can reconstruct the original intent-slot structure.

We identify this structural failure as capability persistence. We propose \underline{Binding \underline{S}ubspace (BSU)}, a representation-level framework that isolates and attenuates intent-conditioned directions underlying this mapping. Across SLU benchmarks, BSU substantially reduces forced-prefix recoverability while preserving retained performance.

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