Recalling The Forgotten Class Memberships: Unlearned Models Can Be Noisy Labelers to Leak Privacy

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sui, Zhihao, Hu, Liang, Cao, Jian, Liu, Dora D., Naseem, Usman, Lai, Zhongyuan, Zhang, Qi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sui, Zhihao
Hu, Liang
Cao, Jian
Liu, Dora D.
Naseem, Usman
Lai, Zhongyuan
Zhang, Qi
author_facet Sui, Zhihao
Hu, Liang
Cao, Jian
Liu, Dora D.
Naseem, Usman
Lai, Zhongyuan
Zhang, Qi
contents Machine Unlearning (MU) technology facilitates the removal of the influence of specific data instances from trained models on request. Despite rapid advancements in MU technology, its vulnerabilities are still underexplored, posing potential risks of privacy breaches through leaks of ostensibly unlearned information. Current limited research on MU attacks requires access to original models containing privacy data, which violates the critical privacy-preserving objective of MU. To address this gap, we initiate an innovative study on recalling the forgotten class memberships from unlearned models (ULMs) without requiring access to the original one. Specifically, we implement a Membership Recall Attack (MRA) framework with a teacher-student knowledge distillation architecture, where ULMs serve as noisy labelers to transfer knowledge to student models. Then, it is translated into a Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) problem for inferring the correct labels of the forgetting instances. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MU methods with multiple real datasets demonstrate that the proposed MRA strategy exhibits high efficacy in recovering class memberships of unlearned instances. As a result, our study and evaluation have established a benchmark for future research on MU vulnerabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19486
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recalling The Forgotten Class Memberships: Unlearned Models Can Be Noisy Labelers to Leak Privacy
Sui, Zhihao
Hu, Liang
Cao, Jian
Liu, Dora D.
Naseem, Usman
Lai, Zhongyuan
Zhang, Qi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Unlearning (MU) technology facilitates the removal of the influence of specific data instances from trained models on request. Despite rapid advancements in MU technology, its vulnerabilities are still underexplored, posing potential risks of privacy breaches through leaks of ostensibly unlearned information. Current limited research on MU attacks requires access to original models containing privacy data, which violates the critical privacy-preserving objective of MU. To address this gap, we initiate an innovative study on recalling the forgotten class memberships from unlearned models (ULMs) without requiring access to the original one. Specifically, we implement a Membership Recall Attack (MRA) framework with a teacher-student knowledge distillation architecture, where ULMs serve as noisy labelers to transfer knowledge to student models. Then, it is translated into a Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) problem for inferring the correct labels of the forgetting instances. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MU methods with multiple real datasets demonstrate that the proposed MRA strategy exhibits high efficacy in recovering class memberships of unlearned instances. As a result, our study and evaluation have established a benchmark for future research on MU vulnerabilities.
title Recalling The Forgotten Class Memberships: Unlearned Models Can Be Noisy Labelers to Leak Privacy
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19486