Papers
arxiv:2609.12808

K-Bench: A Benchmark for LLM Unlearning in Agentic Deployments

Published on Sep 11
Authors:
,
,
,
,

Abstract

K-Bench evaluates LLM unlearning in deployed ReAct agents by inspecting all exposed channels, revealing that standard benchmarks miss leaks through reasoning traces, tool outputs, and prompts.

Unlearning benchmarks such as TOFU and MUSE certify forgetting by reading the model's final answer, where a model that refuses to answer already counts as having forgotten. We show that this model-level certificate does not transfer once the model is deployed as an agent. We introduce K-Bench, a benchmark that scores LLM unlearning under agentic deployment. K-Bench inspects all six channels a ReAct agent exposes, including its chain-of-thought (CoT), tool calls and tool observations, and elicited summary. A query counts as leaked if the secret appears in any of them. Each experiment places the secret in exactly one of the agent's three sources (the weights, the prompt, or the retrieval store). The K-Score is computed separately for each source and credits forgetting only when the agent remains usable. Clearing the answer channel does not make the secret unrecoverable. On structured retrieval, the secret stays verbatim in the tool-observation channel and the aggregate leak rate is unchanged. When the secret lives in the prompt or the retrieval store, TOFU and MUSE report no leakage, while the deployed agent still leaks it on 22--86\% of queries. When the secret is in the weights, none of the twenty evaluated published methods demonstrably removes it, and only an input-corruption intervention reaches selective forgetting under the evaluated observer. The top-ranked method changes across base models. A refusal-tuning method resists the evaluated extraction without verified knowledge removal.

Community

Sign up or log in to comment

Get this paper in your agent:

hf papers read 2609.12808
Don't have the latest CLI?
curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash

Models citing this paper 0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2609.12808 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper 1

Spaces citing this paper 1

Collections including this paper 0

No Collection including this paper

Add this paper to a collection to link it from this page.