Virgile Dine

Virgile Dine, Teddy Furon

This paper proposes a paradigm shift linking machine unlearning directly to the structure of the data distributions rather than a mere update of the neural network parameters. We show that inferring these distributions with precision enables distilling the exact unlearning signal induced by the modeling. Theoretical bounds on the Kullback-Leibler divergence from the ideal retrained model to our unlearned model, under verifiable admissibility criterion, reveal the soundness of our framework. This method is experimentally validated over three forgetting scenarios as reaching the closest classifier to the ideal retrained model when compared to competitors.

Virgile Dine, Teddy Furon, Charly Faure

We formulate the machine unlearning problem as a general constrained optimization problem. It unifies the first-order methods from the approximate machine unlearning literature. This paper then introduces the concept of feasible updates as the model's parameter update directions that help with unlearning while not degrading the utility of the initial model. Our design of feasible updates is based on masking, \ie\ a careful selection of the model's parameters worth updating. It also takes into account the estimation noise of the gradients when processing each batch of data to offer a statistical guarantee to derive locally feasible updates. The technique can be plugged in, as an add-on, to any first-order approximate unlearning methods. Experiments with computer vision classifiers validate this approach.