Structural Memorization in Large Language Models: Advances and Applications in Medical Contexts
Yanfu Zhang, College of William and Mary
The unintended memorization of training data in large language models (LLMs) raises important privacy and reliability concerns, particularly in medical applications. In this talk, I will present recent advances from our group in evaluating and controlling LLM memorization, including input-dependent soft prompts for measuring memorization and model-editing methods for inducing or suppressing it. I will then discuss structural memorization in biomedical language models, focusing on PubMed-scale scientific text. Beyond memorizing individual passages, models may retain higher-order structures such as relationships among biomedical concepts, entities, and scientific knowledge. I will discuss how such structural memorization can be characterized and its implications for reliable and trustworthy medical AI.