Can LLMs Truly Forget? Revealing Unlearning Gaps Through Adversarial Evaluation

2026-08-21

AI Summary

本文通过引入对抗性评估方法，揭示了现有机器遗忘技术在面对策略性提示时仍可能泄露被移除信息的问题。

Abstract

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of targeted training data from a model while preserving its remaining capabilities, but evaluating whether such information has truly become inaccessible remains challenging. Existing benchmarks primarily assess unlearning under clean, non-adversarial queries, leaving open whether information that appears forgotten can still be recovered through strategic prompting. We address this gap through a unified evaluation of prompt-based and fine-tuning-based unlearning methods on TOFU using Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, followed by an adversarial robustness evaluation of methods that perform strongly under standard metrics. We introduce Attack Success Rate (ASR), an LLM-as-judge metric that measures the fraction of adversarial responses whose leakage score exceeds $0.2$, and evaluate recovery across eight attack suites. Our results reveal a substantial gap between clean-query forgetting and adversarial robustness. Although several fine-tuning-based methods achieve Forget Quality above $0.91$, targeted information remains recoverable with ASRs between $72.8\%$ and $84.3\%$, close to the $87.5\%$ ASR of the unprotected base model. In contrast, clean multilingual reformulations yield only $2.95\%$ measured leakage. A manual audit further finds agreement between binary ASR decisions and human factual assessments in seven of ten cases, indicating that ASR provides a useful, though imperfect, signal of behavioral recoverability. These findings show that strong standard-metric performance alone is insufficient to establish robustness after unlearning and motivate adversarial stress-testing as a complementary component of unlearning evaluation.

Problem

• machine unlearning
• adversarial evaluation
• information removal
• prompt-based unlearning
• fine-tuning-based unlearning

Innovation

• Adversarial Evaluation
• Attack Success Rate (ASR)
• Machine Unlearning