Speech Unlearning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cheng, Jiali, Amiri, Hadi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cheng, Jiali
Amiri, Hadi
author_facet Cheng, Jiali
Amiri, Hadi
contents We introduce machine unlearning for speech tasks, a novel and underexplored research problem that aims to efficiently and effectively remove the influence of specific data from trained speech models without full retraining. This has important applications in privacy preservation, removal of outdated or noisy data, and bias mitigation. While machine unlearning has been studied in computer vision and natural language processing, its application to speech is largely unexplored due to the high-dimensional, sequential, and speaker-dependent nature of speech data. We define two fundamental speech unlearning tasks: sample unlearning, which removes individual data points (e.g., a voice recording), and class unlearning, which removes an entire category (e.g., all data from a speaker), while preserving performance on the remaining data. Experiments on keyword spotting and speaker identification demonstrate that unlearning speech data is significantly more challenging than unlearning image or text data. We conclude with key future directions in this area, including structured training, robust evaluation, feature-level unlearning, broader applications, scalable methods, and adversarial robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00848
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Speech Unlearning
Cheng, Jiali
Amiri, Hadi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
We introduce machine unlearning for speech tasks, a novel and underexplored research problem that aims to efficiently and effectively remove the influence of specific data from trained speech models without full retraining. This has important applications in privacy preservation, removal of outdated or noisy data, and bias mitigation. While machine unlearning has been studied in computer vision and natural language processing, its application to speech is largely unexplored due to the high-dimensional, sequential, and speaker-dependent nature of speech data. We define two fundamental speech unlearning tasks: sample unlearning, which removes individual data points (e.g., a voice recording), and class unlearning, which removes an entire category (e.g., all data from a speaker), while preserving performance on the remaining data. Experiments on keyword spotting and speaker identification demonstrate that unlearning speech data is significantly more challenging than unlearning image or text data. We conclude with key future directions in this area, including structured training, robust evaluation, feature-level unlearning, broader applications, scalable methods, and adversarial robustness.
title Speech Unlearning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00848