Soft Weighted Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning, as a post-hoc processing technique, has gained widespread adoption in addressing challenges like bias mitigation and robustness enhancement, colloquially, machine unlearning for fairness and robustness. However, existing non-privacy unlearning-based solutions persist in using binary data removal framework designed for privacy-driven motivation, leading to significant information loss, a phenomenon known as over-unlearning. While over-unlearning has been largely described in many studies as primarily causing utility degradation, we investigate its fundamental causes and provide deeper insights in this work through counterfactual leave-one-out analysis. In this paper, we introduce a weighted influence function that assigns tailored weights to each sample by solving a convex quadratic programming problem analytically. Building on this, we propose a soft-weighted framework enabling fine-grained model adjustments to address the over-unlearning challenge. We demonstrate that the proposed soft-weighted scheme is versatile and can be seamlessly integrated into most existing unlearning algorithms. Extensive experiments show that in fairness- and robustness-driven tasks, the soft-weighted scheme significantly outperforms hard-weighted schemes in fairness/robustness metrics and alleviates the decline in utility metric, thereby enhancing machine unlearning algorithm as an effective correction solution.

DynFrs: An Efficient Framework for Machine Unlearning in Random Forest

Random Forests are widely recognized for establishing efficacy in classification and regression tasks, standing out in various domains such as medical diagnosis, finance, and personalized recommendations. These domains, however, are inherently sensitive to privacy concerns, as personal and confidential data are involved. With increasing demand for the right to be forgotten, particularly under regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, the ability to perform machine unlearning has become crucial for Random Forests. However, insufficient attention was paid to this topic, and existing approaches face difficulties in being applied to real-world scenarios. Addressing this gap, we propose the DynFrs framework designed to enable efficient machine unlearning in Random Forests while preserving predictive accuracy. Dynfrs leverages subsampling method Occ(q) and a lazy tag strategy Lzy, and is still adaptable to any Random Forest variant. In essence, Occ(q) ensures that each sample in the training set occurs only in a proportion of trees so that the impact of deleting samples is limited, and Lzy delays the reconstruction of a tree node until necessary, thereby avoiding unnecessary modifications on tree structures. In experiments, applying Dynfrs on Extremely Randomized Trees yields substantial improvements, achieving orders of magnitude faster unlearning performance and better predictive accuracy than existing machine unlearning methods for Random Forests.

Efficient Online Unlearning via Hessian-Free Recollection of Individual Data Statistics

Machine unlearning strives to uphold the data owners' right to be forgotten by enabling models to selectively forget specific data. Recent methods suggest that one approach of data forgetting is by precomputing and storing statistics carrying second-order information to improve computational and memory efficiency. However, they rely on restrictive assumptions and the computation/storage suffer from the curse of model parameter dimensionality, making it challenging to apply to most deep neural networks. In this work, we propose a Hessian-free online unlearning method. We propose to maintain a statistical vector for each data point, computed through affine stochastic recursion approximation of the difference between retrained and learned models. Our proposed algorithm achieves near-instantaneous online unlearning as it only requires a vector addition operation. Based on the strategy that recollecting statistics for forgetting data, the proposed method significantly reduces the unlearning runtime. Experimental studies demonstrate that the proposed scheme surpasses existing results by orders of magnitude in terms of time and memory costs, while also enhancing accuracy.