Distance Is Not Enough: Forget-Retain Alignment Gap Predicts LLM Relearning Robustness

arXiv:2608.25429 · cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-26 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-26

Updated: 2026-08-26

Comments: Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main Conference

Code: https://github.com/Yi1-Chen/FRAG

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Machine unlearning aims to make a model forget specific data, yet unlearned LLMs often fail to stay unlearned: brief fine-tuning can revive removed knowledge.

Terminology

Abstract

Machine unlearning aims to make a model forget specific data, yet unlearned LLMs often fail to stay unlearned: brief fine-tuning can revive removed knowledge. Existing robustness predictors rely on global weight-space displacement, but distance alone can be misleading when random or destructive updates collapse performance. We argue that relearning robustness depends on update structure: robust unlearning should affect forget-critical weights while sparing retain-critical ones. We introduce the Forget-Retain Alignment Gap (FRAG), a training-free predictor that scores an update's forget-retain alignment without running a relearning attack, and separates selective from dense updates more reliably than global distance. Building on the forget-critical, retain-sparing principle, Forget-Retain Pruning (FRP) improves relearning robustness. Our results suggest that weight selectivity better explains robustness than distance alone. Code is available at https://github.com/Yi1-Chen/FRAG.

Sources

Related papers