The Erasure Illusion: Stress-Testing the Generalization of LLM Forgetting Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the effectiveness of current unlearning metrics for LLMs, revealing they often overestimate success and proposing a new stress-testing framework to better evaluate true model forgetting.

Contribution

The paper introduces Proximal Surrogate Generation (PSG), a novel automated stress-testing method that challenges existing unlearning metrics by revealing their limitations in detecting retained knowledge.

Findings

Current metrics often overestimate unlearning success.

Models retain semantic knowledge despite passing standard tests.

Stress tests expose significant gaps in unlearning evaluation methods.

Abstract

Machine unlearning aims to remove specific data influences from trained models, a capability essential for adhering to copyright laws and ensuring AI safety. Current unlearning metrics typically measure success by monitoring the model's performance degradation on the specific unlearning dataset ($D_u$). We argue that for Large Language Models (LLMs), this evaluation paradigm is insufficient and potentially misleading. Many real-world uses of unlearning--motivated by copyright or safety--implicitly target not only verbatim content in $D_u$, but also behaviors influenced by the broader generalizations the model derived from it. We demonstrate that LLMs can pass standard unlearning evaluation and appear to have "forgotten" the target knowledge, while simultaneously retaining strong capabilities on content that is semantically adjacent to $D_u$. This phenomenon indicates that erasing exact sentences does not necessarily equate to removing the underlying knowledge. To address this gap, we propose Proximal Surrogate Generation (PSG), an automated stress-testing framework that generates a surrogate dataset, $\tilde{D}_u$. This surrogate set is constructed to be semantically derived from $D_u$ yet sufficiently distinct in embedding space. By comparing unlearning metric scores between $D_u$ and $\tilde{D}_u$, we can stress-test the reliability of the metric itself. Our extensive evaluation across three LLM families (Llama-3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Zephyr-7B-$\beta$), three distinct datasets, and seven standard metrics reveals widespread inconsistencies. We find that current metrics frequently overestimate unlearning success, failing to detect retained knowledge exposed by our stress-test datasets.