mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM Unlearning Robustness under Multi-Turn Interaction

arXiv 2603.00823 ↗First posted 28 Feb 2026cs.CL cs.AIcited by 1

On the map: LLM safety and security → Machine unlearning

Abstract (arXiv)

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data from pre-trained models without retraining from scratch, and is increasingly important for large language models (LLMs) due to safety, privacy, and legal concerns. Although prior work primarily evaluates unlearning in static, single-turn settings, forgetting robustness under realistic interactive use remains underexplored. In this paper, we study whether unlearning remains stable in interactive environments by examining two common interaction patterns: self-correction and dialogue-conditioned querying. We find that knowledge appearing forgotten in static evaluation can often be recovered through interaction. Although stronger unlearning improves apparent robustness, it often results in behavioral rigidity rather than genuine knowledge erasure. Our findings suggest that static evaluation may overestimate real-world effectiveness and highlight the need for ensuring stable forgetting under interactive settings.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Machine unlearning, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 22 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2026.

Builds on

22 of 33 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Harry Potter is Still Here! Probing Knowledge Leakage in Targeted Unlearned Large Language Models via Automated Adversarial Prompting22 May
  2. 2024Does Unlearning Truly Unlearn? A Black Box Evaluation of LLM Unlearning Methods18 Nov
  3. 2024Do Unlearning Methods Remove Information from Language Model Weights?11 Oct
  4. 2024An Adversarial Perspective on Machine Unlearning for AI Safety26 Sep
  5. 2024Unlearning or Obfuscating? Jogging the Memory of Unlearned LLMs via Benign Relearning19 Jun
  6. 2024Intrinsic Test of Unlearning Using Parametric Knowledge Traces17 Jun
  7. 2024Eight Methods to Evaluate Robust Unlearning in LLMs26 Feb
  8. 2024TOFU: A Task of Fictitious Unlearning for LLMs11 Jan
  9. 2023Unlearn What You Want to Forget: Efficient Unlearning for LLMs31 Oct
  10. 2023Who's Harry Potter? Approximate Unlearning in LLMs3 Oct
  11. 2022Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models4 Oct

Other references · 11

  1. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,768
  2. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  3. 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 2,950
  4. 2020Extracting Training Data from Large Language Modelscited by 2,144
  5. 2023Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yetcited by 965
  6. 2023Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debugcited by 963
  7. 2024The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use With Unlearningcited by 488
  8. 2023Trustworthy LLMs: a Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignmentcited by 394
  9. 2024When Can LLMs Actually Correct Their Own Mistakes? A Critical Survey of Self-Correction of LLMscited by 230
  10. 2023Can Sensitive Information Be Deleted From LLMs? Objectives for Defending Against Extraction Attackscited by 156
  11. 2024LLM Defenses Are Not Robust to Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks Yetcited by 145

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