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Main Authors: Zhou, Changjun, Zheng, Jintao, Yang, Leyou, Wang, Pengfei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13381
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author Zhou, Changjun
Zheng, Jintao
Yang, Leyou
Wang, Pengfei
author_facet Zhou, Changjun
Zheng, Jintao
Yang, Leyou
Wang, Pengfei
contents Federated Unlearning (FUL) focuses on client data and computing power to offer a privacy-preserving solution. However, high computational demands, complex incentive mechanisms, and disparities in client-side computing power often lead to long times and higher costs. To address these challenges, many existing methods rely on server-side knowledge distillation that solely removes the updates of the target client, overlooking the privacy embedded in the contributions of other clients, which can lead to privacy leakage. In this work, we introduce DPUL, a novel server-side unlearning method that deeply unlearns all influential weights to prevent privacy pitfalls. Our approach comprises three components: (i) identifying high-weight parameters by filtering client update magnitudes, and rolling them back to ensure deep removal. (ii) leveraging the variational autoencoder (VAE) to reconstruct and eliminate low-weight parameters. (iii) utilizing a projection-based technique to recover the model. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that DPUL surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, providing a 1%-5% improvement in accuracy and up to 12x reduction in time cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_13381
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dual-Phase Federated Deep Unlearning via Weight-Aware Rollback and Reconstruction
Zhou, Changjun
Zheng, Jintao
Yang, Leyou
Wang, Pengfei
Machine Learning
I.2.7; C.2.4
Federated Unlearning (FUL) focuses on client data and computing power to offer a privacy-preserving solution. However, high computational demands, complex incentive mechanisms, and disparities in client-side computing power often lead to long times and higher costs. To address these challenges, many existing methods rely on server-side knowledge distillation that solely removes the updates of the target client, overlooking the privacy embedded in the contributions of other clients, which can lead to privacy leakage. In this work, we introduce DPUL, a novel server-side unlearning method that deeply unlearns all influential weights to prevent privacy pitfalls. Our approach comprises three components: (i) identifying high-weight parameters by filtering client update magnitudes, and rolling them back to ensure deep removal. (ii) leveraging the variational autoencoder (VAE) to reconstruct and eliminate low-weight parameters. (iii) utilizing a projection-based technique to recover the model. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that DPUL surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, providing a 1%-5% improvement in accuracy and up to 12x reduction in time cost.
title Dual-Phase Federated Deep Unlearning via Weight-Aware Rollback and Reconstruction
topic Machine Learning
I.2.7; C.2.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13381