OPC: One-Point-Contraction Unlearning Toward Deep Feature Forgetting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jung, Jaeheun, Jung, Bosung, Bae, Suhyun, Lee, Donghun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jung, Jaeheun
Jung, Bosung
Bae, Suhyun
Lee, Donghun
author_facet Jung, Jaeheun
Jung, Bosung
Bae, Suhyun
Lee, Donghun
contents Machine unlearning seeks to remove the influence of particular data or class from trained models to meet privacy, legal, or ethical requirements. Existing unlearning methods tend to forget shallowly: phenomenon of an unlearned model pretend to forget by adjusting only the model response, while its internal representations retain information sufficiently to restore the forgotten data or behavior. We empirically confirm the widespread shallowness by reverting the forgetting effect of various unlearning methods via training-free performance recovery attack and gradient-inversion-based data reconstruction attack. To address this vulnerability fundamentally, we define a theoretical criterion of ``deep forgetting'' based on one-point-contraction of feature representations of data to forget. We also propose an efficient approximation algorithm, and use it to construct a novel general-purpose unlearning algorithm: One-Point-Contraction (OPC). Empirical evaluations on image classification unlearning benchmarks show that OPC achieves not only effective unlearning performance but also superior resilience against both performance recovery attack and gradient-inversion attack. The distinctive unlearning performance of OPC arises from the deep feature forgetting enforced by its theoretical foundation, and recaps the need for improved robustness of machine unlearning methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_07754
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OPC: One-Point-Contraction Unlearning Toward Deep Feature Forgetting
Jung, Jaeheun
Jung, Bosung
Bae, Suhyun
Lee, Donghun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Machine unlearning seeks to remove the influence of particular data or class from trained models to meet privacy, legal, or ethical requirements. Existing unlearning methods tend to forget shallowly: phenomenon of an unlearned model pretend to forget by adjusting only the model response, while its internal representations retain information sufficiently to restore the forgotten data or behavior. We empirically confirm the widespread shallowness by reverting the forgetting effect of various unlearning methods via training-free performance recovery attack and gradient-inversion-based data reconstruction attack. To address this vulnerability fundamentally, we define a theoretical criterion of ``deep forgetting'' based on one-point-contraction of feature representations of data to forget. We also propose an efficient approximation algorithm, and use it to construct a novel general-purpose unlearning algorithm: One-Point-Contraction (OPC). Empirical evaluations on image classification unlearning benchmarks show that OPC achieves not only effective unlearning performance but also superior resilience against both performance recovery attack and gradient-inversion attack. The distinctive unlearning performance of OPC arises from the deep feature forgetting enforced by its theoretical foundation, and recaps the need for improved robustness of machine unlearning methods.
title OPC: One-Point-Contraction Unlearning Toward Deep Feature Forgetting
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07754