Machine unlearning through fine-grained model parameters perturbation

Machine unlearning techniques, which involve retracting data records and reducing influence of said data on trained models, help with the user privacy protection objective but incur significant computational costs. Weight perturbation-based unlearning is a general approach, but it typically involves globally modifying the parameters. We propose fine-grained Top-K and Random-k parameters perturbed inexact machine unlearning strategies that address the privacy needs while keeping the computational costs tractable. In order to demonstrate the efficacy of our strategies we also tackle the challenge of evaluating the effectiveness of machine unlearning by considering the model's generalization performance across both unlearning and remaining data. To better assess the unlearning effect and model generalization, we propose novel metrics, namely, the forgetting rate and memory retention rate. However, for inexact machine unlearning, current metrics are inadequate in quantifying the degree of forgetting that occurs after unlearning strategies are applied. To address this, we introduce SPD-GAN, which subtly perturbs the distribution of data targeted for unlearning. Then, we evaluate the degree of unlearning by measuring the performance difference of the models on the perturbed unlearning data before and after the unlearning process. By implementing these innovative techniques and metrics, we achieve computationally efficacious privacy protection in machine learning applications without significant sacrifice of model performance. Furthermore, this approach provides a novel method for evaluating the degree of unlearning.

eCIL-MU: Embedding based Class Incremental Learning and Machine Unlearning

New categories may be introduced over time, or existing categories may need to be reclassified. Class incremental learning (CIL) is employed for the gradual acquisition of knowledge about new categories while preserving information about previously learned ones in such dynamic environments. It might also be necessary to also eliminate the influence of related categories on the model to adapt to reclassification. We thus introduce class-level machine unlearning (MU) within CIL. Typically, MU methods tend to be time-consuming and can potentially harm the model's performance. A continuous stream of unlearning requests could lead to catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose a non-destructive eCIL-MU framework based on embedding techniques to map data into vectors and then be stored in vector databases. Our approach exploits the overlap between CIL and MU tasks for acceleration. Experiments demonstrate the capability of achieving unlearning effectiveness and orders of magnitude (upto $\sim 278\times$) of acceleration.

Lexicon-constrained Copying Network for Chinese Abstractive Summarization

Copy mechanism allows sequence-to-sequence models to choose words from the input and put them directly into the output, which is finding increasing use in abstractive summarization. However, since there is no explicit delimiter in Chinese sentences, most existing models for Chinese abstractive summarization can only perform character copy, resulting in inefficient. To solve this problem, we propose a lexicon-constrained copying network that models multi-granularity in both encoder and decoder. On the source side, words and characters are aggregated into the same input memory using a Transformerbased encoder. On the target side, the decoder can copy either a character or a multi-character word at each time step, and the decoding process is guided by a word-enhanced search algorithm that facilitates the parallel computation and encourages the model to copy more words. Moreover, we adopt a word selector to integrate keyword information. Experiments results on a Chinese social media dataset show that our model can work standalone or with the word selector. Both forms can outperform previous character-based models and achieve competitive performances.