On Newton's Method to Unlearn Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bui, Nhung, Lu, Xinyang, Sim, Rachael Hwee Ling, Ng, See-Kiong, Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914925444595712
author Bui, Nhung
Lu, Xinyang
Sim, Rachael Hwee Ling
Ng, See-Kiong
Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
author_facet Bui, Nhung
Lu, Xinyang
Sim, Rachael Hwee Ling
Ng, See-Kiong
Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
contents With the widespread applications of neural networks (NNs) trained on personal data, machine unlearning has become increasingly important for enabling individuals to exercise their personal data ownership, particularly the "right to be forgotten" from trained NNs. Since retraining is computationally expensive, we seek approximate unlearning algorithms for NNs that return identical models to the retrained oracle. While Newton's method has been successfully used to approximately unlearn linear models, we observe that adapting it for NN is challenging due to degenerate Hessians that make computing Newton's update impossible. Additionally, we show that when coupled with popular techniques to resolve the degeneracy, Newton's method often incurs offensively large norm updates and empirically degrades model performance post-unlearning. To address these challenges, we propose CureNewton's method, a principle approach that leverages cubic regularization to handle the Hessian degeneracy effectively. The added regularizer eliminates the need for manual finetuning and affords a natural interpretation within the unlearning context. Experiments across different models and datasets show that our method can achieve competitive unlearning performance to the state-of-the-art algorithm in practical unlearning settings, while being theoretically justified and efficient in running time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_14507
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Newton's Method to Unlearn Neural Networks
Bui, Nhung
Lu, Xinyang
Sim, Rachael Hwee Ling
Ng, See-Kiong
Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
With the widespread applications of neural networks (NNs) trained on personal data, machine unlearning has become increasingly important for enabling individuals to exercise their personal data ownership, particularly the "right to be forgotten" from trained NNs. Since retraining is computationally expensive, we seek approximate unlearning algorithms for NNs that return identical models to the retrained oracle. While Newton's method has been successfully used to approximately unlearn linear models, we observe that adapting it for NN is challenging due to degenerate Hessians that make computing Newton's update impossible. Additionally, we show that when coupled with popular techniques to resolve the degeneracy, Newton's method often incurs offensively large norm updates and empirically degrades model performance post-unlearning. To address these challenges, we propose CureNewton's method, a principle approach that leverages cubic regularization to handle the Hessian degeneracy effectively. The added regularizer eliminates the need for manual finetuning and affords a natural interpretation within the unlearning context. Experiments across different models and datasets show that our method can achieve competitive unlearning performance to the state-of-the-art algorithm in practical unlearning settings, while being theoretically justified and efficient in running time.
title On Newton's Method to Unlearn Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14507