Machine Unlearning using Forgetting Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hatua, Amartya, Nguyen, Trung T., Cano, Filip, Sung, Andrew H.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Hatua, Amartya
Nguyen, Trung T.
Cano, Filip
Sung, Andrew H.
author_facet Hatua, Amartya
Nguyen, Trung T.
Cano, Filip
Sung, Andrew H.
contents Modern computer systems store vast amounts of personal data, enabling advances in AI and ML but risking user privacy and trust. For privacy reasons, it is sometimes desired for an ML model to forget part of the data it was trained on. In this paper, we introduce a novel unlearning approach based on Forgetting Neural Networks (FNNs), a neuroscience-inspired architecture that explicitly encodes forgetting through multiplicative decay factors. While FNNs had previously been studied as a theoretical construct, we provide the first concrete implementation and demonstrate their effectiveness for targeted unlearning. We propose several variants with per-neuron forgetting factors, including rank-based assignments guided by activation levels, and evaluate them on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST benchmarks. Our method systematically removes information associated with forget sets while preserving performance on retained data. Membership inference attacks confirm the effectiveness of FNN-based unlearning in erasing information about the training data from the neural network. These results establish FNNs as a promising foundation for efficient and interpretable unlearning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_22374
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Machine Unlearning using Forgetting Neural Networks
Hatua, Amartya
Nguyen, Trung T.
Cano, Filip
Sung, Andrew H.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Modern computer systems store vast amounts of personal data, enabling advances in AI and ML but risking user privacy and trust. For privacy reasons, it is sometimes desired for an ML model to forget part of the data it was trained on. In this paper, we introduce a novel unlearning approach based on Forgetting Neural Networks (FNNs), a neuroscience-inspired architecture that explicitly encodes forgetting through multiplicative decay factors. While FNNs had previously been studied as a theoretical construct, we provide the first concrete implementation and demonstrate their effectiveness for targeted unlearning. We propose several variants with per-neuron forgetting factors, including rank-based assignments guided by activation levels, and evaluate them on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST benchmarks. Our method systematically removes information associated with forget sets while preserving performance on retained data. Membership inference attacks confirm the effectiveness of FNN-based unlearning in erasing information about the training data from the neural network. These results establish FNNs as a promising foundation for efficient and interpretable unlearning.
title Machine Unlearning using Forgetting Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22374