OpenGU: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Unlearning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fan, Bowen, Ai, Yuming, Li, Xunkai, Guo, Zhilin, Li, Rong-Hua, Wang, Guoren
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fan, Bowen
Ai, Yuming
Li, Xunkai
Guo, Zhilin
Li, Rong-Hua
Wang, Guoren
author_facet Fan, Bowen
Ai, Yuming
Li, Xunkai
Guo, Zhilin
Li, Rong-Hua
Wang, Guoren
contents Graph Machine Learning is essential for understanding and analyzing relational data. However, privacy-sensitive applications demand the ability to efficiently remove sensitive information from trained graph neural networks (GNNs), avoiding the unnecessary time and space overhead caused by retraining models from scratch. To address this issue, Graph Unlearning (GU) has emerged as a critical solution, with the potential to support dynamic graph updates in data management systems and enable scalable unlearning in distributed data systems while ensuring privacy compliance. Unlike machine unlearning in computer vision or other fields, GU faces unique difficulties due to the non-Euclidean nature of graph data and the recursive message-passing mechanism of GNNs. Additionally, the diversity of downstream tasks and the complexity of unlearning requests further amplify these challenges. Despite the proliferation of diverse GU strategies, the absence of a benchmark providing fair comparisons for GU, and the limited flexibility in combining downstream tasks and unlearning requests, have yielded inconsistencies in evaluations, hindering the development of this domain. To fill this gap, we present OpenGU, the first GU benchmark, where 16 SOTA GU algorithms and 37 multi-domain datasets are integrated, enabling various downstream tasks with 13 GNN backbones when responding to flexible unlearning requests. Based on this unified benchmark framework, we are able to provide a comprehensive and fair evaluation for GU. Through extensive experimentation, we have drawn $8$ crucial conclusions about existing GU methods, while also gaining valuable insights into their limitations, shedding light on potential avenues for future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_02728
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OpenGU: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Unlearning
Fan, Bowen
Ai, Yuming
Li, Xunkai
Guo, Zhilin
Li, Rong-Hua
Wang, Guoren
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Graph Machine Learning is essential for understanding and analyzing relational data. However, privacy-sensitive applications demand the ability to efficiently remove sensitive information from trained graph neural networks (GNNs), avoiding the unnecessary time and space overhead caused by retraining models from scratch. To address this issue, Graph Unlearning (GU) has emerged as a critical solution, with the potential to support dynamic graph updates in data management systems and enable scalable unlearning in distributed data systems while ensuring privacy compliance. Unlike machine unlearning in computer vision or other fields, GU faces unique difficulties due to the non-Euclidean nature of graph data and the recursive message-passing mechanism of GNNs. Additionally, the diversity of downstream tasks and the complexity of unlearning requests further amplify these challenges. Despite the proliferation of diverse GU strategies, the absence of a benchmark providing fair comparisons for GU, and the limited flexibility in combining downstream tasks and unlearning requests, have yielded inconsistencies in evaluations, hindering the development of this domain. To fill this gap, we present OpenGU, the first GU benchmark, where 16 SOTA GU algorithms and 37 multi-domain datasets are integrated, enabling various downstream tasks with 13 GNN backbones when responding to flexible unlearning requests. Based on this unified benchmark framework, we are able to provide a comprehensive and fair evaluation for GU. Through extensive experimentation, we have drawn $8$ crucial conclusions about existing GU methods, while also gaining valuable insights into their limitations, shedding light on potential avenues for future research.
title OpenGU: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Unlearning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02728