Georu Lee
Author directory2026
Confess What You Know: Forget-Set Misalignment with Model Knowledge in LLM Unlearning
Miso Kim | Georu Lee | Seungwon Jeong | Woojin Lee
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Miso Kim | Georu Lee | Seungwon Jeong | Woojin Lee
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) often assumes that a pre-defined forget set matches what the model has memorized, but this frequently breaks in realistic privacy settings where the original training data is inaccessible. We term this gap forget-set misalignment and identify two cases. In *Under Unlearning*, the forget set omits memorized information and leakage persists. In *Out-of-Knowledge Unlearning*, the algorithm is driven to "forget" knowledge the model never learned, perturbing parameters and degrading utility. Using gradient-level analysis, we show these behaviors arise from misaligned unlearning targets rather than specific optimization choices. We then propose **CONfession-to-Forget-Set (CONFS)**, a *data-blind* framework that constructs model-aligned forget sets by eliciting and formalizing the model’s memorized knowledge. Across synthetic, multimodal, and real-world benchmarks, CONFS approaches Gold-standard performance on several metrics and achieves a competitive forgetting-utility balance, while preserving utility better than other data-blind forget-set constructions.