Model Sparsity Can Simplify Machine Unlearning

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Jia, Jinghan, Liu, Jiancheng, Ram, Parikshit, Yao, Yuguang, Liu, Gaowen, Liu, Yang, Sharma, Pranay, Liu, Sijia
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866910309064638464
author Jia, Jinghan
Liu, Jiancheng
Ram, Parikshit
Yao, Yuguang
Liu, Gaowen
Liu, Yang
Sharma, Pranay
Liu, Sijia
author_facet Jia, Jinghan
Liu, Jiancheng
Ram, Parikshit
Yao, Yuguang
Liu, Gaowen
Liu, Yang
Sharma, Pranay
Liu, Sijia
contents In response to recent data regulation requirements, machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical process to remove the influence of specific examples from a given model. Although exact unlearning can be achieved through complete model retraining using the remaining dataset, the associated computational costs have driven the development of efficient, approximate unlearning techniques. Moving beyond data-centric MU approaches, our study introduces a novel model-based perspective: model sparsification via weight pruning, which is capable of reducing the gap between exact unlearning and approximate unlearning. We show in both theory and practice that model sparsity can boost the multi-criteria unlearning performance of an approximate unlearner, closing the approximation gap, while continuing to be efficient. This leads to a new MU paradigm, termed prune first, then unlearn, which infuses a sparse model prior into the unlearning process. Building on this insight, we also develop a sparsity-aware unlearning method that utilizes sparsity regularization to enhance the training process of approximate unlearning. Extensive experiments show that our proposals consistently benefit MU in various unlearning scenarios. A notable highlight is the 77% unlearning efficacy gain of fine-tuning (one of the simplest unlearning methods) when using sparsity-aware unlearning. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical impact of our proposed MU methods in addressing other machine learning challenges, such as defending against backdoor attacks and enhancing transfer learning. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-Sparse.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2304_04934
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Model Sparsity Can Simplify Machine Unlearning
Jia, Jinghan
Liu, Jiancheng
Ram, Parikshit
Yao, Yuguang
Liu, Gaowen
Liu, Yang
Sharma, Pranay
Liu, Sijia
Machine Learning
In response to recent data regulation requirements, machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical process to remove the influence of specific examples from a given model. Although exact unlearning can be achieved through complete model retraining using the remaining dataset, the associated computational costs have driven the development of efficient, approximate unlearning techniques. Moving beyond data-centric MU approaches, our study introduces a novel model-based perspective: model sparsification via weight pruning, which is capable of reducing the gap between exact unlearning and approximate unlearning. We show in both theory and practice that model sparsity can boost the multi-criteria unlearning performance of an approximate unlearner, closing the approximation gap, while continuing to be efficient. This leads to a new MU paradigm, termed prune first, then unlearn, which infuses a sparse model prior into the unlearning process. Building on this insight, we also develop a sparsity-aware unlearning method that utilizes sparsity regularization to enhance the training process of approximate unlearning. Extensive experiments show that our proposals consistently benefit MU in various unlearning scenarios. A notable highlight is the 77% unlearning efficacy gain of fine-tuning (one of the simplest unlearning methods) when using sparsity-aware unlearning. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical impact of our proposed MU methods in addressing other machine learning challenges, such as defending against backdoor attacks and enhancing transfer learning. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-Sparse.
title Model Sparsity Can Simplify Machine Unlearning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.04934