Towards Lifecycle Unlearning Commitment Management: Measuring Sample-level Unlearning Completeness

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Cheng-Long, Li, Qi, Xiang, Zihang, Cao, Yinzhi, Wang, Di
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wang, Cheng-Long
Li, Qi
Xiang, Zihang
Cao, Yinzhi
Wang, Di
author_facet Wang, Cheng-Long
Li, Qi
Xiang, Zihang
Cao, Yinzhi
Wang, Di
contents Growing concerns over data privacy and security highlight the importance of machine unlearning--removing specific data influences from trained models without full retraining. Techniques like Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) are widely used to externally assess successful unlearning. However, existing methods face two key limitations: (1) maximizing MIA effectiveness (e.g., via online attacks) requires prohibitive computational resources, often exceeding retraining costs; (2) MIAs, designed for binary inclusion tests, struggle to capture granular changes in approximate unlearning. To address these challenges, we propose the Interpolated Approximate Measurement (IAM), a framework natively designed for unlearning inference. IAM quantifies sample-level unlearning completeness by interpolating the model's generalization-fitting behavior gap on queried samples. IAM achieves strong performance in binary inclusion tests for exact unlearning and high correlation for approximate unlearning--scalable to LLMs using just one pre-trained shadow model. We theoretically analyze how IAM's scoring mechanism maintains performance efficiently. We then apply IAM to recent approximate unlearning algorithms, revealing general risks of both over-unlearning and under-unlearning, underscoring the need for stronger safeguards in approximate unlearning systems. The code is available at https://github.com/Happy2Git/Unlearning_Inference_IAM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Lifecycle Unlearning Commitment Management: Measuring Sample-level Unlearning Completeness
Wang, Cheng-Long
Li, Qi
Xiang, Zihang
Cao, Yinzhi
Wang, Di
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Growing concerns over data privacy and security highlight the importance of machine unlearning--removing specific data influences from trained models without full retraining. Techniques like Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) are widely used to externally assess successful unlearning. However, existing methods face two key limitations: (1) maximizing MIA effectiveness (e.g., via online attacks) requires prohibitive computational resources, often exceeding retraining costs; (2) MIAs, designed for binary inclusion tests, struggle to capture granular changes in approximate unlearning. To address these challenges, we propose the Interpolated Approximate Measurement (IAM), a framework natively designed for unlearning inference. IAM quantifies sample-level unlearning completeness by interpolating the model's generalization-fitting behavior gap on queried samples. IAM achieves strong performance in binary inclusion tests for exact unlearning and high correlation for approximate unlearning--scalable to LLMs using just one pre-trained shadow model. We theoretically analyze how IAM's scoring mechanism maintains performance efficiently. We then apply IAM to recent approximate unlearning algorithms, revealing general risks of both over-unlearning and under-unlearning, underscoring the need for stronger safeguards in approximate unlearning systems. The code is available at https://github.com/Happy2Git/Unlearning_Inference_IAM.
title Towards Lifecycle Unlearning Commitment Management: Measuring Sample-level Unlearning Completeness
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06112