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Main Authors: Jin, Deliang, Chen, Gang, Feng, Shuo, Ling, Yufeng, Zhu, Haoran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11615
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author Jin, Deliang
Chen, Gang
Feng, Shuo
Ling, Yufeng
Zhu, Haoran
author_facet Jin, Deliang
Chen, Gang
Feng, Shuo
Ling, Yufeng
Zhu, Haoran
contents Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their performance can be severely degraded by noisy or corrupted training data. Conventional noise mitigation methods often rely on explicit assumptions about noise distributions or require extensive retraining, which can be impractical for large-scale models. Inspired by the principles of machine unlearning, we propose a novel framework that integrates attribution-guided data partitioning, discriminative neuron pruning, and targeted fine-tuning to mitigate the impact of noisy samples. Our approach employs gradient-based attribution to probabilistically distinguish high-quality examples from potentially corrupted ones without imposing restrictive assumptions on the noise. It then applies regression-based sensitivity analysis to identify and prune neurons that are most vulnerable to noise. Finally, the resulting network is fine-tuned on the high-quality data subset to efficiently recover and enhance its generalization performance. This integrated unlearning-inspired framework provides several advantages over conventional noise-robust learning approaches. Notably, it combines data-level unlearning with model-level adaptation, thereby avoiding the need for full model retraining or explicit noise modeling. We evaluate our method on representative tasks (e.g., CIFAR-10 image classification and speech recognition) under various noise levels and observe substantial gains in both accuracy and efficiency. For example, our framework achieves approximately a 10% absolute accuracy improvement over standard retraining on CIFAR-10 with injected label noise, while reducing retraining time by up to 47% in some settings. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach for achieving robust generalization in noisy environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11615
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Machine Unlearning for Robust DNNs: Attribution-Guided Partitioning and Neuron Pruning in Noisy Environments
Jin, Deliang
Chen, Gang
Feng, Shuo
Ling, Yufeng
Zhu, Haoran
Machine Learning
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their performance can be severely degraded by noisy or corrupted training data. Conventional noise mitigation methods often rely on explicit assumptions about noise distributions or require extensive retraining, which can be impractical for large-scale models. Inspired by the principles of machine unlearning, we propose a novel framework that integrates attribution-guided data partitioning, discriminative neuron pruning, and targeted fine-tuning to mitigate the impact of noisy samples. Our approach employs gradient-based attribution to probabilistically distinguish high-quality examples from potentially corrupted ones without imposing restrictive assumptions on the noise. It then applies regression-based sensitivity analysis to identify and prune neurons that are most vulnerable to noise. Finally, the resulting network is fine-tuned on the high-quality data subset to efficiently recover and enhance its generalization performance. This integrated unlearning-inspired framework provides several advantages over conventional noise-robust learning approaches. Notably, it combines data-level unlearning with model-level adaptation, thereby avoiding the need for full model retraining or explicit noise modeling. We evaluate our method on representative tasks (e.g., CIFAR-10 image classification and speech recognition) under various noise levels and observe substantial gains in both accuracy and efficiency. For example, our framework achieves approximately a 10% absolute accuracy improvement over standard retraining on CIFAR-10 with injected label noise, while reducing retraining time by up to 47% in some settings. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach for achieving robust generalization in noisy environments.
title Machine Unlearning for Robust DNNs: Attribution-Guided Partitioning and Neuron Pruning in Noisy Environments
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11615