I-CARE: Analysis of interference-related phenomena in a controllable, diverse and representative unlearning setting for text-to-image models

arXiv:2609.00003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning studies the removal of knowledge from an AI model, making the system forget a concept it previously learned. Despite rapid progress in generative machine unlearning, the unintended degradation of semantically related concepts that should have been retained (henceforth, interference) remains poorly characterized and inconsistently evaluated. This paper introduces I-CARE, a methodology that formalizes interference as a first-class object of study in generative unlearning. Rather than proposing a new benchmark or unlearning algorithm, I-CARE provides formal definitions for tasks, metrics, and templates for reporting results, ena