Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Balordi, Antonio, Manini, Lorenzo, Stella, Fabio, Merlo, Alessio
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19065
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866910000471867392
author Balordi, Antonio
Manini, Lorenzo
Stella, Fabio
Merlo, Alessio
author_facet Balordi, Antonio
Manini, Lorenzo
Stella, Fabio
Merlo, Alessio
contents Privacy regulations require the erasure of data from deep learning models. This is a significant challenge that is amplified in Federated Learning, where data remains on clients, making full retraining or coordinated updates often infeasible. This work introduces an efficient Federated Unlearning framework based on information theory, modeling leakage as a parameter estimation problem. Our method uses second-order Hessian information to identify and selectively reset only the parameters most sensitive to the data being forgotten, followed by minimal federated retraining. This model-agnostic approach supports categorical and client unlearning without requiring server access to raw client data after initial information aggregation. Evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate strong privacy (MIA success near random, categorical knowledge erased) and high performance (Normalized Accuracy against re-trained benchmarks of $\approx$ 0.9), while aiming for increased efficiency over complete retraining. Furthermore, in a targeted backdoor attack scenario, our framework effectively neutralizes the malicious trigger, restoring model integrity. This offers a practical solution for data forgetting in FL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19065
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tackling Federated Unlearning as a Parameter Estimation Problem
Balordi, Antonio
Manini, Lorenzo
Stella, Fabio
Merlo, Alessio
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
Privacy regulations require the erasure of data from deep learning models. This is a significant challenge that is amplified in Federated Learning, where data remains on clients, making full retraining or coordinated updates often infeasible. This work introduces an efficient Federated Unlearning framework based on information theory, modeling leakage as a parameter estimation problem. Our method uses second-order Hessian information to identify and selectively reset only the parameters most sensitive to the data being forgotten, followed by minimal federated retraining. This model-agnostic approach supports categorical and client unlearning without requiring server access to raw client data after initial information aggregation. Evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate strong privacy (MIA success near random, categorical knowledge erased) and high performance (Normalized Accuracy against re-trained benchmarks of $\approx$ 0.9), while aiming for increased efficiency over complete retraining. Furthermore, in a targeted backdoor attack scenario, our framework effectively neutralizes the malicious trigger, restoring model integrity. This offers a practical solution for data forgetting in FL.
title Tackling Federated Unlearning as a Parameter Estimation Problem
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19065