Can Sensitive Information Be Deleted From LLMs? Objectives for Defending
  Against Extraction Attacks
Vaidehi Patil Peter Hase Mohit Bansal
Pretrained language models sometimes possess knowledge that we do not wish
them to, including memorized personal information and knowledge that could be
used to harm people. They can also output toxic or harmful text. To mitigate
these safety and informational issues, we propose an attack-and-defense
framework for studying the task of deleting sensitive information directly from
model weights. We study direct edits to model weights because (1) this approach
should guarantee that particular deleted information is never extracted by
future prompt attacks, and (2) it should protect against whitebox attacks,
which is necessary for making claims about safety/privacy in a setting where
publicly available model weights could be used to elicit sensitive information.
Our threat model assumes that an attack succeeds if the answer to a sensitive
question is located among a set of B generated candidates, based on scenarios
where the information would be insecure if the answer is among B candidates.
Experimentally, we show that even state-of-the-art model editing methods such
as ROME struggle to truly delete factual information from models like GPT-J, as
our whitebox and blackbox attacks can recover "deleted" information from an
edited model 38% of the time. These attacks leverage two key observations: (1)
that traces of deleted information can be found in intermediate model hidden
states, and (2) that applying an editing method for one question may not delete
information across rephrased versions of the question. Finally, we provide new
defense methods that protect against some extraction attacks, but we do not
find a single universally effective defense method. Our results suggest that
truly deleting sensitive information is a tractable but difficult problem,
since even relatively low attack success rates have potentially severe societal
implications for real-world deployment of language models.