现有大模型遗忘技术在采样时仍会泄露敏感信息,新指标揭示这一漏洞。
Leak@$k$: Unlearning Does Not Make LLMs Forget Under Probabilistic Decoding
- 提出新评估指标 leak@$k$,衡量模型在采样时遗忘知识的重现概率。
- 实验证明主流遗忘方法在概率采样下仍存在显著信息泄漏,尤其在 k=100 时泄漏率超 80%。
- 设计鲁棒遗忘算法 RULE,可在 TOFU、MUSE 等数据集上实现接近零泄漏的遗忘效果。
大语言模型的遗忘技术对合规与伦理生成至关重要,但本研究发现,几乎所有现有方法在确定性解码下表现良好,而在真实场景的随机采样中仍会可靠地重现敏感信息。为此,我们提出 leak@$k$ 新元评估指标,量化在生成 k 个样本时遗忘内容的重现概率。基于 TOFU、MUSE、WMDP 三个基准的系统性研究显示,当前最先进遗忘技术仅能实现有限遗忘。我们提出鲁棒遗忘算法 RULE,可在 TOFU 基准上实现无泄漏(leak@$k$=0),并在 MUSE 基准上于多数采样预算 $k$ 下优于现有 SOTA 方法。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) is critical for regulatory compliance and for building ethical generative AI systems that avoid producing private, toxic, illegal, or copyrighted content. Despite rapid progress, in this work, we show that \textit{almost all} existing unlearning methods fail to achieve true forgetting in practice. Specifically, while evaluations of these `unlearned' models under deterministic (greedy) decoding often suggest successful knowledge removal using standard benchmarks, we show that sensitive information reliably resurfaces when models are sampled with standard probabilistic decoding. To rigorously capture this vulnerability, we introduce \texttt{leak@$k$}, a new meta-evaluation metric that quantifies the likelihood of forgotten knowledge reappearing when generating $k$ samples from the model under realistic decoding strategies. Using three widely adopted benchmarks, TOFU, MUSE, and WMDP, we conduct the first large-scale, systematic study of unlearning reliability using \texttt{leak@$k$} metric. Our findings demonstrate that knowledge leakage persists across methods and tasks, underscoring that current state-of-the-art (SOTA) unlearning techniques provide only limited forgetting. We propose an algorithm, termed Robust Unlearning under LEak@$k$ metric (\texttt{RULE}) to address this concern. We demonstrate that \texttt{RULE} provides an unlearned model for TOFU benchmark with no information leakage for a large number of generation samples. On the MUSE benchmark, \texttt{RULE} outperforms SOTA unlearning methods under the \texttt{leak@$k$} metric across most sampling budgets $k$. Codes are available at https://github.com/OptimAI-Lab/Leak-k.
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