The paper introduces auditability as a fourth evaluation axis for machine unlearning, measuring the separation between forgotten and retained data via a statistic computed by the provider. Experiments on eleven unlearning methods across TOFU, MUSE, and RWKU datasets show none satisfy all four axes, prompting the authors to propose a two‑stage approach: GapWiden, which widens the audit statistic gap using a hinge loss, and GapVeil, an inference‑time rejection sampler that refines responses based on audit statistics. The combined method achieves oracle‑level auditability and leakage control for all tested unlearning techniques, while improving retain performance for most methods.
By Piyush Tiwary, Anushka Srivastava, Prathosh A. P
arXiv:2606. 16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements.
By Dayong Ye, Tianqing Zhu, Ruiding Huang, Xinbo Fu, Jiayang Li, Bo Liu, Huan Huo, Wanlei Zhou
Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge.
arXiv:2607. 05898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating whether unlearning algorithms truly remove training data influence remains an open challenge.
By Sahasrajit Sarmasarkar, Anastasia Koloskova, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv:2506.10946v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Unlearning large language models (LLMs) is important due to copyright and privacy concerns. A key challenge is unintended forgetting, where r...
By Peizhi Niu, Evelyn Ma, Boya Hou, Huiting Zhou, Duo Zhou, Huan Zhang, S. Rasoul Etesami, Olgica Milenkovic
arXiv:2607. 00605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Limited Memory Language Models (LMLMs) externalize factual knowledge to a database to enable deletion-based unlearning without retraining.
By Arya Raeesi, Hanna Roed
arXiv:2608.21606v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of targeted training data from a model while preserving its remaining capabilities, but evaluating whet...
By Ayush Gupta, Hima Varshini Surisetty, Sreevidya Bollineni, Varad Ingale, Tuhina Tripathi, Abhishek Lalwani, Somya Chatterjee, Sadid Hasan
arXiv:2605. 07482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to selectively remove memorized content such as private data, copyrighted text, or hazardous knowledge, without costly full retraining.
By Zizhao Hu, Ameya Godbole, Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei, Mohammad Rostami, Jesse Thomason, Robin Jia
The paper investigates how machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) can unintentionally erase related knowledge, even in distant domains. By analyzing the propagation of unlearning effects before any model updates, the authors discover a consistent decay pattern where collateral damage is strongest near the targeted forget set and diminishes with semantic distance but never fully disappears at domain boundaries. They propose a pre-unlearning prediction task—forget-set auditing—to identify potential collateral damage early, finding that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set are the most predictive signals. This approach offers an early warning system for risky unlearning runs and guides the design of more reliable unlearning procedures.
By Bo Su, Ankit Shah, Thai Le
arXiv:2606. 14518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The removal of learned data from Machine Learning models through Machine Unlearning (MU) has been widely studied; however, there has yet to be an agreed-upon scheme for auditing MU.
By Liou Tang, James Joshi, Ashish Kundu
The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.
By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
The paper investigates the privacy risks inherent in auditing machine unlearning (MU) when the audit relies only on querying the model for behavioral signals. It shows that such generic audit schemes inevitably leak information about the retained data set, providing a geometric transfer theorem that bounds the distinguishability of retained set membership based on audit accuracy. The study also analyzes how the unlearned set, target sample, and query protocol influence the privacy‑audit transfer coefficient, with empirical evidence from both convex and non‑convex models supporting the theoretical findings.
By Liou Tang, James Joshi, Ashish Kundu