Towards Source-Free Machine Unlearning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ahmed, Sk Miraj, Basaran, Umit Yigit, Raychaudhuri, Dripta S., Dutta, Arindam, Kundu, Rohit, Niloy, Fahim Faisal, Guler, Basak, Roy-Chowdhury, Amit K.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ahmed, Sk Miraj
Basaran, Umit Yigit
Raychaudhuri, Dripta S.
Dutta, Arindam
Kundu, Rohit
Niloy, Fahim Faisal
Guler, Basak
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit K.
author_facet Ahmed, Sk Miraj
Basaran, Umit Yigit
Raychaudhuri, Dripta S.
Dutta, Arindam
Kundu, Rohit
Niloy, Fahim Faisal
Guler, Basak
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit K.
contents As machine learning becomes more pervasive and data privacy regulations evolve, the ability to remove private or copyrighted information from trained models is becoming an increasingly critical requirement. Existing unlearning methods often rely on the assumption of having access to the entire training dataset during the forgetting process. However, this assumption may not hold true in practical scenarios where the original training data may not be accessible, i.e., the source-free setting. To address this challenge, we focus on the source-free unlearning scenario, where an unlearning algorithm must be capable of removing specific data from a trained model without requiring access to the original training dataset. Building on recent work, we present a method that can estimate the Hessian of the unknown remaining training data, a crucial component required for efficient unlearning. Leveraging this estimation technique, our method enables efficient zero-shot unlearning while providing robust theoretical guarantees on the unlearning performance, while maintaining performance on the remaining data. Extensive experiments over a wide range of datasets verify the efficacy of our method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_15127
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Source-Free Machine Unlearning
Ahmed, Sk Miraj
Basaran, Umit Yigit
Raychaudhuri, Dripta S.
Dutta, Arindam
Kundu, Rohit
Niloy, Fahim Faisal
Guler, Basak
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit K.
Machine Learning
As machine learning becomes more pervasive and data privacy regulations evolve, the ability to remove private or copyrighted information from trained models is becoming an increasingly critical requirement. Existing unlearning methods often rely on the assumption of having access to the entire training dataset during the forgetting process. However, this assumption may not hold true in practical scenarios where the original training data may not be accessible, i.e., the source-free setting. To address this challenge, we focus on the source-free unlearning scenario, where an unlearning algorithm must be capable of removing specific data from a trained model without requiring access to the original training dataset. Building on recent work, we present a method that can estimate the Hessian of the unknown remaining training data, a crucial component required for efficient unlearning. Leveraging this estimation technique, our method enables efficient zero-shot unlearning while providing robust theoretical guarantees on the unlearning performance, while maintaining performance on the remaining data. Extensive experiments over a wide range of datasets verify the efficacy of our method.
title Towards Source-Free Machine Unlearning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15127