Unlearning during Learning: An Efficient Federated Machine Unlearning Method
This addresses the need for practical unlearning in federated learning to support data privacy rights, though it is incremental as it builds on existing FMU concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient and limited federated machine unlearning (FMU) in federated learning by introducing FedAU, a framework that integrates unlearning during training with a lightweight module and linear operations, achieving effective unlearning while preserving model accuracy on datasets like MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100.
In recent years, Federated Learning (FL) has garnered significant attention as a distributed machine learning paradigm. To facilitate the implementation of the right to be forgotten, the concept of federated machine unlearning (FMU) has also emerged. However, current FMU approaches often involve additional time-consuming steps and may not offer comprehensive unlearning capabilities, which renders them less practical in real FL scenarios. In this paper, we introduce FedAU, an innovative and efficient FMU framework aimed at overcoming these limitations. Specifically, FedAU incorporates a lightweight auxiliary unlearning module into the learning process and employs a straightforward linear operation to facilitate unlearning. This approach eliminates the requirement for extra time-consuming steps, rendering it well-suited for FL. Furthermore, FedAU exhibits remarkable versatility. It not only enables multiple clients to carry out unlearning tasks concurrently but also supports unlearning at various levels of granularity, including individual data samples, specific classes, and even at the client level. We conducted extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100 datasets to evaluate the performance of FedAU. The results demonstrate that FedAU effectively achieves the desired unlearning effect while maintaining model accuracy. Our code is availiable at https://github.com/Liar-Mask/FedAU.