Knowledge Control for Responsible Generative AI: Bridging Academia, Industry, and Society

AbstractControlling the knowledge and behavior of generative AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), and text-to-image (T2I) models, has become critical as they are increasingly used in safety-sensitive and socially impactful applications. These models often encode unintended, biased, or private content, leading to harmful or unethical outputs. Post-training knowledge control has thus emerged as a practical framework for selectively modifying or removing model behaviors without full retraining, offering scalable and interpretable interventions for improving safety, privacy, and fairness. This tutorial introduces the foundations of post-training knowledge control and showcases recent frontier methods, bridging research insights with real-world practices from both academia and industry. We cover: (i) key motivations and failure modes, such as harmful generation and stereotype reinforcement; (ii) core methods such as machine unlearning, knowledge editing, and inference-time interventions for targeted behavior adjustment; and (iii) evaluation protocols for balancing forgetting, retention, and fairness. Case studies will span text and vision–language generation, including privacy preservation, bias mitigation, and factual correction.