This work introduces CleanSlate, a benchmark for verbatim output suppression over songs and books, with model-specific extraction profiles, content-grounded QA, and capability-retention evaluations, and shows that practical unlearning is not only an optimization problem once a forget set is given, but also what can be unlearnt and what else is damaged.
Abstract
Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted data or behaviors from a trained model without retraining from scratch. Yet most evaluations assume that the examples to forget are already known. In realistic language-model deployments, a requester may ask a model to stop reproducing a song or book without knowing which spans, documents, quotations, or near-duplicates in a trillion-token corpus support that behavior. We study this missing upstream problem, forget set curation: mapping a suppression request to the data passed to an unlearning algorithm. We introduce CleanSlate, a benchmark for verbatim output suppression over songs and books, with model-specific extraction profiles, content-grounded QA, and capability-retention evaluations. CleanSlate exposes two failure modes. Natural lexical and exact-substring curators often yield forget sets that lead to weak suppression. An evaluation-aware curator suppresses requested continuations almost completely, but causes collateral regression on non-requested content and model-dependent capability loss. These results show that practical unlearning is not only an optimization problem once a forget set is given: the data chosen for forgetting determines both what can be unlearnt and what else is damaged.
Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) often assumes that a pre-defined forget set matches what the model has memorized, but this frequently breaks in realistic privacy settings where the original training data is inaccessible. We term this gap forget-set misalignment and identify two cases. In Under Unlearning, the forget set omits memorized information and leakage persists. In Out-of-Knowledge Unlearning, the algorithm is driven to"forget"knowledge the model never learned, perturbing parameters and degrading utility. Using gradient-level analysis, we show these behaviors arise from misaligned unlearning targets rather than specific optimization choices. We then propose CONfession-to-Forget-Set (CONFS), a data-blind framework that constructs model-aligned forget sets by eliciting and formalizing the model's memorized knowledge. Across synthetic, multimodal, and real-world benchmarks, CONFS approaches Gold-standard performance on several metrics and achieves a competitive forgetting-utility balance, while preserving utility better than other data-blind forget-set constructions.
Miso Kim, Georu Lee, Seungwon Jeong et al.· 0 citations
ADU is presented, a fine-grained, training-based framework that shifts unlearning from token erasure to contextual attention-pathway decoupling, and achieves the strongest aggregate performance among evaluated baselines on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks.
Xun-Lei Chen, Qirui Ye, Yuang Li et al.· 0 citations
This work proposes Causal Localization and Retain-Aware Projection (CLRP), a lightweight training-free framework that uses activation patching to identify the layer that causally mediates target-attribute disclosure, then applies a retain-aware projection that removes the target-attribute subspace while preserving same-identity evidence.
Junkai Lin, Junkai Chen, Siqi Hou et al.· 0 citations
This work constructs a benchmark that captures unintended degradation on benign inputs sharing generic patterns with the forget set, and proposes Selective Protection with Anchored Regularization, which protects generic patterns via anchored activation filtering while reinforcing them through entity-abstracted enhancement.
Junxian You, Junkai Chen, Yuhao He et al.· 0 citations
Machine unlearning in LLMs is the targeted removal of specific knowledge while preserving all other capabilities, critical for privacy and safety. Yet existing benchmarks measure it unreliably. They miss knowledge that resurfaces under paraphrased or indirect queries, a failure we call under-forgetting, and lack the semantic, syntactic, and lexical probes needed to verify that unrelated knowledge is preserved, a failure we call over-forgetting. Both failures reflect an asymmetric generalization problem. Forget evaluation must cover diverse query formulations of the same target facts, testing whether forgetting holds beyond exact training prompts. Retain evaluation must probe a far larger and implicitly defined set, namely every fact disjoint from the forget target. The retain set thus defines the effective forget set, yet current datasets provide no fine-grained annotation of this forget-retain boundary. We address this with SUITE, an evaluation protocol and training corpus that captures forget-retain structure for real-world factual domains. Methods trained on SUITE improve substantially, showing that training data is as important as algorithmic design. Building on the obtained insights, we introduce JensUn++, an unlearning algorithm that achieves the best forget-retain utility trade-off across three LLMs, in both sequential and joint unlearning settings. Code and datasets are available at https://amitpeleg.github.io/forget-narrowly-retain-broadly
Amit Peleg, N. Singh, Naama Pearl et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
The results demonstrate that suppressing entity-linked supervision during pretraining induces a shift in epistemic behavior: KLLMs rely less on parametric knowledge and more on external evidence, leading to improved reliability under realistic conditions, suggesting that pretraining-time control over knowledge acquisition can complement retrieval-augmented and tool-based systems by providing a more evidence-sensitive base model.
Roi Cohen, Yvan Carr'e, Nick Lechtenborger et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
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