Association Restoration Test: Revealing Restorable Shortcuts after Unlearning

Abstract

Association unlearning aims to disable learned label-attribute shortcuts while preserving task performance. Existing evaluations mainly measure output-level robustness or probe whether shortcut attributes remain readable in frozen features, but neither test determines whether a retained association remains functionally usable by the original classifier. We propose the Association Restoration Test (ART), a post-hoc diagnostic for functional shortcut restorability. ART estimates class-conditional association directions, amplifies residual components, and evaluates the modified features with the original classifier head. Across Waterbirds, CelebA, SpuCoDogs, and an ISIC timestamp-artifact extension, we show that output metrics, representation probes, and ART characterize distinct aspects of shortcut mitigation. These findings motivate restoration-aware evaluation for unlearning and shortcut-mitigation methods that target learned associations rather than individual classes or concepts.