Intrinsic Evaluation of Unlearning Using Parametric Knowledge Traces
Authors: name: Yihuai Hong, name: Lei Yu, name: Shauli Ravfogel, name: Haiqin Yang, name: Mor Geva

The task of "unlearning" certain concepts in large language models (LLMs) has
attracted immense attention recently, due to its importance for mitigating
undesirable model behaviours, such as the generation of harmful, private, or
incorrect information. Current protocols to evaluate unlearning methods largely
rely on behavioral tests, without monitoring the presence of unlearned
knowledge within the model's parameters. This residual knowledge can be
adversarially exploited to recover the erased information post-unlearning. We
argue that unlearning should also be evaluated internally, by considering
changes in the parametric knowledge traces of the unlearned concepts. To this
end, we propose a general methodology for eliciting directions in the parameter
space (termed "concept vectors") that encode concrete concepts, and construct
ConceptVectors, a benchmark dataset containing hundreds of common concepts and
their parametric knowledge traces within two open-source LLMs. Evaluation on
ConceptVectors shows that existing unlearning methods minimally impact concept
vectors, while directly ablating these vectors demonstrably removes the
associated knowledge from the LLMs and significantly reduces their
susceptibility to adversarial manipulation. Our results highlight limitations
in behavioral-based unlearning evaluations and call for future work to include
parametric-based evaluations. To support this, we release our code and
benchmark at https://github.com/yihuaihong/ConceptVectors.