Dvir Alsheich
Author directory2026
The Geometry of Ignorance: Detecting Suppressed Knowledge in LLMs through Activation Fragmentation
Adar Peleg | Dvir Alsheich | Tomer Ashuach | Avi Mendelson
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Adar Peleg | Dvir Alsheich | Tomer Ashuach | Avi Mendelson
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Evaluating whether a large language model (LLM) genuinely knows a concept remains a fundamental problem, since behavioral metrics can be fooled by suppression: a model that refuses to answer may still harbor recoverable knowledge. We introduce **Activation Fragmentation**, a framework that diagnoses parametric knowledge directly from internal geometry, with no token generation. The framework measures the geometric coherence of anon-vectors, the differences in hidden states between a concept-specific query and its anonymized paraphrase, and shows that genuine knowledge forms a tight, low-entropy cluster while ignorance forces geometric fragmentation. Across ten instruction-tuned LLMs from three model families, all fragmentation metrics reliably separate known from unknown concepts, and post-unlearning, fragmentation geometry correlates with adversarial recovery across four attack types and five unlearning algorithms, though the direction of that relationship is shown to depend on attack methodology. Furthermore, a layer-resolved analysis reveals that different adversarial mechanisms exploit this geometry at varying depths, with high attack-specific correlations that are invisible to behavioral evaluation. Together, these results constitute a single-phase, attack-free proxy for unlearning robustness that captures aspects of parametric knowledge inaccessible to output-level metrics.