Yi Chen
Author directoryOther people with similar names: yi Chen, Yi Chen, Yi Chen, Yi Chen, Yi Chen
Unverified author pages with similar names: Yi Chen
2026
Distance Is Not Enough: Forget-Retain Alignment Gap Predicts LLM Relearning Robustness
Yi Chen | Hanna Hsieh | Shuhong Liu | Chuanbo Hua | Zihan Ma | Kun Wang | Joo-Young Kim
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yi Chen | Hanna Hsieh | Shuhong Liu | Chuanbo Hua | Zihan Ma | Kun Wang | Joo-Young Kim
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Machine unlearning aims to make a model forget specific data, yet unlearned LLMs often fail to stay unlearned: brief fine-tuning can revive removed knowledge. Existing robustness predictors rely on global weight-space displacement, but distance alone can be misleading when random or destructive updates collapse performance. We argue that relearning robustness depends on update structure: robust unlearning should affect forget-critical weights while sparing retain-critical ones. We introduce the Forget-Retain Alignment Gap (FRAG), a training-free predictor that scores an update’s forget-retain alignment without running a relearning attack, and separates selective from dense updates more reliably than global distance. Building on the forget-critical, retain-sparing principle, Forget-Retain Pruning (FRP) improves relearning robustness. Our results suggest that weight selectivity better explains robustness than distance alone. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yi1-Chen/FRAG.