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Erasing Without Remembering: Implicit Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models
来源日期（仅到月份） 2026-07
来源记录日期 2026-07
雷达观测 2026-11-01 22:06
摘要
In this paper, we investigate knowledge forgetting in large language models with a focus on its generalisation—ensuring that models forget not only specific training samples but also related implicit knowledge. To this end, we begin by identifying a broader unlearning scope that includes both target data and logically associated samples, including rephrased, subject-replaced, relation-reversed, and one-hop reasoned data. We then conduct a rigorous evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art methods across three datasets, revealing that unlearned models still recall paraphrased answers and retain target facts in their intermediate layers. This motivates us to take a preliminary step toward more generalised implicit knowledge forgetting by proposing PERMU—a novel probability perturbation-based unlearning paradigm. PERMU simulates adversarial unlearning samples to eliminate fact-related tokens from the logit distribution, collectively reducing the probabilities of all answer-associated tokens. Experiments are conducted on a diverse range of datasets, including TOFU, Harry Potter, ZsRE, WMDP, and MUSE, using models ranging from 1.3B to 13B in scale. The results demonstrate that PERMU delivers up to a 50.40% improvement in unlearning vanilla target data while maintaining a 40.73% boost in forgetting implicit knowledge. Our code can be found in the supplementary material.
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记录 #1 · 2026-07 · 最新观测版本
Erasing Without Remembering: Implicit Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models
In this paper, we investigate knowledge forgetting in large language models with a focus on its generalisation—ensuring that models forget not only specific training samples but also related implicit knowledge. To this end, we begin by identifying a broader unlearning scope that includes both target data and logically associated samples, including rephrased, subject-replaced, relation-reversed, and one-hop reasoned data. We then conduct a rigorous evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art methods across three datasets, revealing that unlearned models still recall paraphrased answers and retain target facts in their intermediate layers. This motivates us to take a preliminary step toward more generalised implicit knowledge forgetting by proposing PERMU—a novel probability perturbation-based unlearning paradigm. PERMU simulates adversarial unlearning samples to eliminate fact-related tokens from the logit distribution, collectively reducing the probabilities of all answer-associated tokens. Experiments are conducted on a diverse range of datasets, including TOFU, Harry Potter, ZsRE, WMDP, and MUSE, using models ranging from 1.3B to 13B in scale. The results demonstrate that PERMU delivers up to a 50.40% improvement in unlearning vanilla target data while maintaining a 40.73% boost in forgetting implicit knowledge. Our code can be found in the supplementary material.
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