Group-robust Machine Unlearning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: De Min, Thomas, Roy, Subhankar, Lathuilière, Stéphane, Ricci, Elisa, Mancini, Massimiliano
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author De Min, Thomas
Roy, Subhankar
Lathuilière, Stéphane
Ricci, Elisa
Mancini, Massimiliano
author_facet De Min, Thomas
Roy, Subhankar
Lathuilière, Stéphane
Ricci, Elisa
Mancini, Massimiliano
contents Machine unlearning is an emerging paradigm to remove the influence of specific training data (i.e., the forget set) from a model while preserving its knowledge of the rest of the data (i.e., the retain set). Previous approaches assume the forget data to be uniformly distributed from all training datapoints. However, if the data to unlearn is dominant in one group (e.g., ethnicity, gender), we empirically show that performance for this group degrades, leading to fairness issues. To perform unlearning while preserving fairness, this work addresses the overlooked problem of non-uniformly distributed forget sets, which we refer to as group-robust machine unlearning. We formalize the problem and present a simple and effective exact unlearning strategy that mitigates the performance loss in dominant groups via sample distribution reweighting. Moreover, we present MIU (Mutual Information-aware Machine Unlearning), the first approach for group robustness in approximate machine unlearning. MIU minimizes the mutual information between model features and group information, achieving unlearning while reducing performance degradation in the dominant group of the forget set. Additionally, MIU exploits sample distribution reweighting and mutual information calibration with the original model to preserve group robustness. We conduct experiments on three datasets and show that MIU outperforms standard methods, achieving unlearning without compromising model robustness. Source code available at https://github.com/tdemin16/group-robust_machine_unlearning
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09330
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Group-robust Machine Unlearning
De Min, Thomas
Roy, Subhankar
Lathuilière, Stéphane
Ricci, Elisa
Mancini, Massimiliano
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Machine unlearning is an emerging paradigm to remove the influence of specific training data (i.e., the forget set) from a model while preserving its knowledge of the rest of the data (i.e., the retain set). Previous approaches assume the forget data to be uniformly distributed from all training datapoints. However, if the data to unlearn is dominant in one group (e.g., ethnicity, gender), we empirically show that performance for this group degrades, leading to fairness issues. To perform unlearning while preserving fairness, this work addresses the overlooked problem of non-uniformly distributed forget sets, which we refer to as group-robust machine unlearning. We formalize the problem and present a simple and effective exact unlearning strategy that mitigates the performance loss in dominant groups via sample distribution reweighting. Moreover, we present MIU (Mutual Information-aware Machine Unlearning), the first approach for group robustness in approximate machine unlearning. MIU minimizes the mutual information between model features and group information, achieving unlearning while reducing performance degradation in the dominant group of the forget set. Additionally, MIU exploits sample distribution reweighting and mutual information calibration with the original model to preserve group robustness. We conduct experiments on three datasets and show that MIU outperforms standard methods, achieving unlearning without compromising model robustness. Source code available at https://github.com/tdemin16/group-robust_machine_unlearning
title Group-robust Machine Unlearning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09330