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RWKU: Benchmarking Real-World Knowledge Unlearning for Large Language Models

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arxiv 2406.10890 v1 pith:X3IIGKAA submitted 2024-06-16 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.LG
keywords unlearningknowledgemodelsreal-worldcorpusforgetretainrwku
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Large language models (LLMs) inevitably memorize sensitive, copyrighted, and harmful knowledge from the training corpus; therefore, it is crucial to erase this knowledge from the models. Machine unlearning is a promising solution for efficiently removing specific knowledge by post hoc modifying models. In this paper, we propose a Real-World Knowledge Unlearning benchmark (RWKU) for LLM unlearning. RWKU is designed based on the following three key factors: (1) For the task setting, we consider a more practical and challenging unlearning setting, where neither the forget corpus nor the retain corpus is accessible. (2) For the knowledge source, we choose 200 real-world famous people as the unlearning targets and show that such popular knowledge is widely present in various LLMs. (3) For the evaluation framework, we design the forget set and the retain set to evaluate the model's capabilities across various real-world applications. Regarding the forget set, we provide four four membership inference attack (MIA) methods and nine kinds of adversarial attack probes to rigorously test unlearning efficacy. Regarding the retain set, we assess locality and utility in terms of neighbor perturbation, general ability, reasoning ability, truthfulness, factuality, and fluency. We conduct extensive experiments across two unlearning scenarios, two models and six baseline methods and obtain some meaningful findings. We release our benchmark and code publicly at http://rwku-bench.github.io for future work.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Towards Evaluation for Real-World LLM Unlearning

    cs.AI 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    DCUE evaluates LLM unlearning by comparing core-token confidence score distributions of the unlearned model and the original model, corrected by a validation set, using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.

  2. What Should LLMs Forget? Quantifying Personal Data in LLMs for Right-to-Be-Forgotten Requests

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    WikiMem, a Wikidata-derived canary dataset and a calibrated NLL-ranking metric, identifies which human-fact associations an LLM has memorized, with higher rates for famous people and larger models.

  3. LLM Unlearning Should Be Form-Independent

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Existing LLM unlearning is form-dependent; the new ORT benchmark measures this, and the training-free ROCR edit reduces it by redirecting concept representations.

  4. Existing Large Language Model Unlearning Evaluations Are Inconclusive

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Existing LLM unlearning evaluations are inconclusive: they can inject new information, depend heavily on task format, and rely on spurious correlations.

  5. R-TOFU: Unlearning in Large Reasoning Models

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    R-TOFU shows that answer-level unlearning is insufficient for large reasoning models because residual knowledge persists in chain-of-thought traces.

  6. SoK: Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A new taxonomy for LLM unlearning distinguishes removal-intended from suppression-intended methods, and argues that gradient ascent methods functionally behave like suppression.

  7. Lifting Data-Tracing Machine Unlearning to Knowledge-Tracing for Foundation Models

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A position paper urging a shift from data-tracing to knowledge-tracing machine unlearning for foundation models, supported by a CLIP case study that shows current methods struggle to generalize.

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