提出动态测试框架,揭露大模型遗忘技术在复杂查询下的脆弱性
The Unlearning Mirage: A Dynamic Framework for Evaluating LLM Unlearning
- 通过构建从简单到多跳的结构化查询,精准控制测试难度
- 发现现有方法在多跳任务中遗忘失效,暴露真实漏洞
- 适合关注模型安全与合规性的研究人员和工程师
大语言模型的遗忘技术旨在提升安全性、减少偏见并满足法律要求(如被遗忘权)。然而现有方法极不稳健:轻微查询变化(如多跳推理、实体别名)即可恢复已遗忘信息。当前评估指标因依赖静态非结构化基准,常产生虚假有效性。我们提出动态测试框架,使用复杂结构化查询压力测试遗忘鲁棒性。该方法先提取目标模型(遗忘前)知识,构建从简单到多跳链的针对性探针,精确控制查询难度。实验表明,该框架(1)自动生成语义等价问答探针,覆盖率与现有基准相当;(2)与已有评估结果一致;(3)发现了其他基准遗漏的新遗忘失败,尤其在多跳场景。激活分析显示,单跳查询多走主导计算路径,易被遗忘方法破坏;而多跳查询常使用替代路径,往往保持完整,解释了多跳场景下遗忘技术的脆弱性。本框架实现无需人工构建遗忘测试集的可扩展评估,便于实际应用。代码与pip包已公开。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to enhance safety, mitigate biases, and comply with legal mandates, such as the right to be forgotten. However, existing unlearning methods are brittle: minor query modifications, such as multi-hop reasoning and entity aliasing, can recover supposedly forgotten information. As a result, current evaluation metrics often create an illusion of effectiveness, failing to detect these vulnerabilities due to reliance on static, unstructured benchmarks. We propose a dynamic framework that stress tests unlearning robustness using complex structured queries. Our approach first elicits knowledge from the target model (pre-unlearning) and constructs targeted probes, ranging from simple queries to multi-hop chains, allowing precise control over query difficulty. Our experiments show that the framework (1) shows comparable coverage to existing benchmarks by automatically generating semantically equivalent Q&A probes, (2) aligns with prior evaluations, and (3) uncovers new unlearning failures missed by other benchmarks, particularly in multi-hop settings. Furthermore, activation analyses show that single-hop queries typically follow dominant computation pathways, which are more likely to be disrupted by unlearning methods. In contrast, multi-hop queries tend to use alternative pathways that often remain intact, explaining the brittleness of unlearning techniques in multi-hop settings. Our framework enables practical and scalable evaluation of unlearning methods without the need for manual construction of forget test sets, enabling easier adoption for real-world applications. We release the pip package and the code at https://sites.google.com/view/unlearningmirage/home.
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