Graph Propagated Projection Unlearning: A Unified Framework for Vision and Audio Discriminative Models

The need to selectively and efficiently erase learned information from deep neural networks is becoming increasingly important for privacy, regulatory compliance, and adaptive system design. We introduce Graph-Propagated Projection Unlearning (GPPU), a unified and scalable algorithm for class-level unlearning that operates across both vision and audio models. GPPU employs graph-based propagation to identify class-specific directions in the feature space and projects representations onto the orthogonal subspace, followed by targeted fine-tuning, to ensure that target class information is effectively and irreversibly removed. Through comprehensive evaluations on six vision datasets and two large-scale audio benchmarks spanning a variety of architectures including CNNs, Vision Transformers, and Audio Transformers, we demonstrate that GPPU achieves highly efficient unlearning, realizing 10-20x speedups over prior methodologies while preserving model utility on retained classes. Our framework provides a principled and modality-agnostic approach to machine unlearning, evaluated at a scale that has received limited attention in prior work, contributing toward more efficient and responsible deep learning.

Quantum-Inspired Audio Unlearning: Towards Privacy-Preserving Voice Biometrics

The widespread adoption of voice-enabled authentication and audio biometric systems have significantly increased privacy vulnerabilities associated with sensitive speech data. Compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR's right to be forgotten and India's DPDP Act necessitates targeted and efficient erasure of individual-specific voice signatures from already-trained biometric models. Existing unlearning methods designed for visual data inadequately handle the sequential, temporal, and high-dimensional nature of audio signals, leading to ineffective or incomplete speaker and accent erasure. To address this, we introduce QPAudioEraser, a quantum-inspired audio unlearning framework. Our our-phase approach involves: (1) weight initialization using destructive interference to nullify target features, (2) superposition-based label transformations that obscure class identity, (3) an uncertainty-maximizing quantum loss function, and (4) entanglement-inspired mixing of correlated weights to retain model knowledge. Comprehensive evaluations with ResNet18, ViT, and CNN architectures across AudioMNIST, Speech Commands, LibriSpeech, and Speech Accent Archive datasets validate QPAudioEraser's superior performance. The framework achieves complete erasure of target data (0% Forget Accuracy) while incurring minimal impact on model utility, with a performance degradation on retained data as low as 0.05%. QPAudioEraser consistently surpasses conventional baselines across single-class, multi-class, sequential, and accent-level erasure scenarios, establishing the proposed approach as a robust privacy-preserving solution.