Auditing Reasoning-Trace Memorization Claims after Unlearning with Head-Conditioned Canaries

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have made machine unlearning more challenging, as protected facts or unsafe rationales may surface in intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) traces before the final answer is produced. Existing unlearning objectives typically suppress the target content or redirect internal representations, but they never specify how the post-forgetting trajectory should continue, which can lead to hallucinated substitutes, malformed boundaries, or repetitive outputs. We argue that LRM unlearning should instead learn a natural forgetting trajectory: a coherent non-disclosing CoT followed by a stable refusal-style answer that replace the original disclosure. To this end, we propose Guided Answer-Reasoning Distillation (GUARD), which converts model-generated unsafe disclosures into safe-exit trajectories, aligns a frozen LRM via guidance tokens, and distills the guided behavior into model parameters. To address the lack of metrics for replacement quality beyond leakage, we further introduce Natural Forgetting Reasoning Score (NFRS), which captures structural stability, fluency, and unsupported substitutes in forgotten outputs. Extensive experiments on R-TOFU and a STAR-1-derived harmful-intent setting show that GUARD substantially reduces unsafe and privacy disclosures across two widely adopted distilled LRMs while preserving reasoning utility.

Prior white-box studies show that large language models can retain latent traces of target knowledge after unlearning, even when the knowledge is no longer expressed in their outputs. However, existing audits remain limited to one-off diagnostics: it is unclear whether these residual signals can predict future recovery under continued training or serve as reliable optimization targets. Resolving this gap is essential to determine whether internal auditing can move beyond post-hoc evaluation toward proactive risk monitoring and safer unlearning. We propose J-Access, an inference-time audit that uses the Jacobian lens to map intermediate representations into vocabulary space and measures how often target concepts remain accessible along the model's output pathway. We hypothesize that residual accessibility reflects recovery susceptibility: knowledge that remains closer to the output pathway requires less fine-tuning to restore, leading to faster recovery. We audit 398 public unlearned models spanning eight unlearning methods. We find that: (1) most unlearned models retain access above the retain-only gold level; (2) pre-attack accessibility predicts recovery speed and extent at the model level, but cannot identify which specific facts will be recovered; and (3) directly minimizing J-Access does not promote genuine deletion. Instead, the model learns to hide knowledge from the audit, producing lower audit scores but greater post-attack recovery. These findings position J-Access as a model-level diagnostic for assessing residual susceptibility in unlearned models. We argue internal audits should serve as an independent diagnostic dimension in unlearning evaluation, and should not be converted into optimization targets without validation.

Limited Memory Language Models (LMLMs) externalize factual knowledge to a database to enable deletion-based unlearning without retraining. Existing evaluations measure post-deletion correctness in aggregate and cannot tell whether a deleted fact persists through residual parametric memory, alternative retrieval paths, or near-neighbor retrieval artifacts. We propose a causal auditing framework that holds the model fixed and varies the database state at inference time across three interventions: FULL, DEL-ON, and DEL-OFF. The framework decomposes post-deletion behavior into parametric leakage L(f), retrieval-mediated correctness R(f), and a retrieval artifact rate grounded in the inference-time retrieval trace. We apply it to 12,228 alias-closure deletions across thirteen databases, including four adversarial topologies (Base, Alias, Noise, Collision) we construct in three domains, and six prompt formulations. Parametric leakage is near zero in every variant and every prompt style: the model rarely returns the deleted answer in the absence of retrieval. The residual that does survive lives in the retrieval graph: retrieval-mediated correctness and the retrieval artifact rate match within rounding everywhere, so post-deletion correctness is, in our audit, predominantly reconstituted from near-neighbor retrieval. This residual ranges from 0.7% on the released LMLM database to 13.6% on the most adversarial variant, and prompt formulation does not independently control how much of a deleted fact survives. These results suggest that, for this class of LMLM and deletion procedure, the unlearning boundary is drawn primarily by the database administrator rather than by the model.