Certified Unlearning for Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Koloskova, Anastasia, Allouah, Youssef, Jha, Animesh, Guerraoui, Rachid, Koyejo, Sanmi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Koloskova, Anastasia
Allouah, Youssef
Jha, Animesh
Guerraoui, Rachid
Koyejo, Sanmi
author_facet Koloskova, Anastasia
Allouah, Youssef
Jha, Animesh
Guerraoui, Rachid
Koyejo, Sanmi
contents We address the problem of machine unlearning, where the goal is to remove the influence of specific training data from a model upon request, motivated by privacy concerns and regulatory requirements such as the "right to be forgotten." Unfortunately, existing methods rely on restrictive assumptions or lack formal guarantees. To this end, we propose a novel method for certified machine unlearning, leveraging the connection between unlearning and privacy amplification by stochastic post-processing. Our method uses noisy fine-tuning on the retain data, i.e., data that does not need to be removed, to ensure provable unlearning guarantees. This approach requires no assumptions about the underlying loss function, making it broadly applicable across diverse settings. We analyze the theoretical trade-offs in efficiency and accuracy and demonstrate empirically that our method not only achieves formal unlearning guarantees but also performs effectively in practice, outperforming existing baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/stair-lab/certified-unlearning-neural-networks-icml-2025
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06985
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Certified Unlearning for Neural Networks
Koloskova, Anastasia
Allouah, Youssef
Jha, Animesh
Guerraoui, Rachid
Koyejo, Sanmi
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
We address the problem of machine unlearning, where the goal is to remove the influence of specific training data from a model upon request, motivated by privacy concerns and regulatory requirements such as the "right to be forgotten." Unfortunately, existing methods rely on restrictive assumptions or lack formal guarantees. To this end, we propose a novel method for certified machine unlearning, leveraging the connection between unlearning and privacy amplification by stochastic post-processing. Our method uses noisy fine-tuning on the retain data, i.e., data that does not need to be removed, to ensure provable unlearning guarantees. This approach requires no assumptions about the underlying loss function, making it broadly applicable across diverse settings. We analyze the theoretical trade-offs in efficiency and accuracy and demonstrate empirically that our method not only achieves formal unlearning guarantees but also performs effectively in practice, outperforming existing baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/stair-lab/certified-unlearning-neural-networks-icml-2025
title Certified Unlearning for Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06985