Measuring the Depth of LLM Unlearning via Activation Patching

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) unlearning has emerged as a crucial post-hoc mechanism for privacy protection and AI safety, yet auditing whether target knowledge is truly erased remains challenging. Existing output-level metrics fail to detect when this knowledge remains recoverable from internal representations. Recent white-box studies reveal such residual knowledge but often rely on auxiliary training or dataset-specific adaptations, leaving no generalizable metric. We close this gap with the Unlearning Depth Score (UDS), a metric that quantifies the mechanistic depth of unlearning via activation patching. UDS first identifies layers that encode the target knowledge using a retain model baseline, then measures how much of it is erased in the unlearned model on a 0-1 scale. In a meta-evaluation across 20 metrics on 150 unlearned models spanning 8 methods, UDS achieves the highest faithfulness and robustness, confirming our causal approach as the most reliable for unlearning evaluation. Case studies further show that UDS uncovers residual knowledge obscured from observational metrics by representational shifts, with erasure depth varying across prompt types. We provide guidelines for integrating UDS into existing benchmarking frameworks and streamlining the evaluation pipeline. Code and data are available at https://github.com/gnueaj/unlearning-depth-score.