Rewind-to-Delete: Certified Machine Unlearning for Nonconvex Functions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mu, Siqiao, Klabjan, Diego
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Mu, Siqiao
Klabjan, Diego
author_facet Mu, Siqiao
Klabjan, Diego
contents Machine unlearning algorithms aim to efficiently remove data from a model without retraining it from scratch, in order to remove corrupted or outdated data or respect a user's ``right to be forgotten." Certified machine unlearning is a strong theoretical guarantee based on differential privacy that quantifies the extent to which an algorithm erases data from the model weights. In contrast to existing works in certified unlearning for convex or strongly convex loss functions, or nonconvex objectives with limiting assumptions, we propose the first, first-order, black-box (i.e., can be applied to models pretrained with vanilla gradient descent) algorithm for unlearning on general nonconvex loss functions, which unlearns by ``rewinding" to an earlier step during the learning process before performing gradient descent on the loss function of the retained data points. We prove $(ε, δ)$ certified unlearning and performance guarantees that establish the privacy-utility-complexity tradeoff of our algorithm, and we prove generalization guarantees for functions that satisfy the Polyak-Lojasiewicz inequality. Finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm compared to existing methods, within a new experimental framework that more accurately reflects unlearning user data in practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_09778
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rewind-to-Delete: Certified Machine Unlearning for Nonconvex Functions
Mu, Siqiao
Klabjan, Diego
Machine Learning
Machine unlearning algorithms aim to efficiently remove data from a model without retraining it from scratch, in order to remove corrupted or outdated data or respect a user's ``right to be forgotten." Certified machine unlearning is a strong theoretical guarantee based on differential privacy that quantifies the extent to which an algorithm erases data from the model weights. In contrast to existing works in certified unlearning for convex or strongly convex loss functions, or nonconvex objectives with limiting assumptions, we propose the first, first-order, black-box (i.e., can be applied to models pretrained with vanilla gradient descent) algorithm for unlearning on general nonconvex loss functions, which unlearns by ``rewinding" to an earlier step during the learning process before performing gradient descent on the loss function of the retained data points. We prove $(ε, δ)$ certified unlearning and performance guarantees that establish the privacy-utility-complexity tradeoff of our algorithm, and we prove generalization guarantees for functions that satisfy the Polyak-Lojasiewicz inequality. Finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm compared to existing methods, within a new experimental framework that more accurately reflects unlearning user data in practice.
title Rewind-to-Delete: Certified Machine Unlearning for Nonconvex Functions
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09778