Mechanism-Guided Selective Unlearning for RLVR-Induced Reasoning

Summary

We propose MAST (Mechanism-Aligned Selective Targeting), a mechanism-guided method for unlearning RLVR-induced reasoning with substantially lower collateral damage than standard full-parameter updates. In matched SFT/RLVR checkpoints on Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B and Qwen3-1.7B-Base, the SFT-to-RLVR increment differs sharply from the SFT update in token-level delta-log-probability, and full-parameter gradient ascent forgets only by damaging retain MATH and GSM8K. MAST ranks attention-projection tensors by off-principal energy, update magnitude, and forget-gradient coupling magnitude, then updates only the top-ranked subset. On the primary model, MAST induces statistically significant target forgetting (MATH forget 45/150 to 37/150; McNemar p=0.0078) while preserving GSM8K (+0.8 pp) and MATH retain (-0.5 pp). The advantage reproduces across seeds, NPO/SimNPO objectives, and Qwen3, where MAST preserves GSM8K while full-parameter unlearning collapses it.