Are we truly forgetting? A critical re-examination of machine unlearning evaluation protocols

Machine unlearning is a process to remove specific data points from a trained model while maintaining the performance on the retain data, addressing privacy or legal requirements. Despite its importance, existing unlearning evaluations tend to focus on logit-based metrics under small-scale scenarios. We observe that this could lead to a false sense of security in unlearning approaches under real-world scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation that employs representation-based evaluations of the unlearned model under large-scale scenarios to verify whether the unlearning approaches truly eliminate the targeted data from the model’s representation perspective. Our analysis reveals that current state-of-the-art unlearning approaches either completely degrade the representational quality of the unlearned model or merely modify the classifier, thereby achieving superior logit-based performance while maintaining representational similarity to the original model. Furthermore, we introduce a novel unlearning evaluation scenario in which the forgetting classes exhibit semantic similarity to downstream task classes, necessitating that feature representations diverge significantly from those of the original model, thus enabling a more thorough evaluation from a representation perspective. We hope our benchmark will serve as a standardized protocol for evaluating unlearning algorithms under realistic conditions.