Exact Federated Continual Unlearning for Ridge Heads on Frozen Foundation Models
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866910053592727552 |
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| author | Quan, Yijun Wu, Wentai Montana, Giovanni |
| author_facet | Quan, Yijun Wu, Wentai Montana, Giovanni |
| contents | Foundation models are commonly deployed as frozen feature extractors with a small trainable head to adapt to private, user-generated data in federated settings. The ``right to be forgotten'' requires removing the influence of specific samples or users from the trained model on demand. Existing federated unlearning methods target general deep models and rely on approximate reconstruction or selective retraining, making exactness costly or elusive. We study this problem in a practically relevant but under-explored regime: a frozen foundation model with a ridge-regression head. The exact optimum depends on the data only through two additive sufficient statistics, which we turn into a communication protocol supporting an arbitrary stream of add and delete requests via fixed-size messages. The server maintains a head that is, in exact arithmetic, pointwise identical to centralized retraining after every request. We provide deterministic retrain-equivalence guarantees, order and partition invariance, two server-side variants, and a Bayesian certificate of zero KL divergence. Experiments on four benchmarks confirm the guarantees: both variants match centralized ridge retraining to within $10^{-9}$ relative Frobenius error and complete each request at orders-of-magnitude lower cost than federated retraining baselines. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_12977 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Exact Federated Continual Unlearning for Ridge Heads on Frozen Foundation Models Quan, Yijun Wu, Wentai Montana, Giovanni Machine Learning Foundation models are commonly deployed as frozen feature extractors with a small trainable head to adapt to private, user-generated data in federated settings. The ``right to be forgotten'' requires removing the influence of specific samples or users from the trained model on demand. Existing federated unlearning methods target general deep models and rely on approximate reconstruction or selective retraining, making exactness costly or elusive. We study this problem in a practically relevant but under-explored regime: a frozen foundation model with a ridge-regression head. The exact optimum depends on the data only through two additive sufficient statistics, which we turn into a communication protocol supporting an arbitrary stream of add and delete requests via fixed-size messages. The server maintains a head that is, in exact arithmetic, pointwise identical to centralized retraining after every request. We provide deterministic retrain-equivalence guarantees, order and partition invariance, two server-side variants, and a Bayesian certificate of zero KL divergence. Experiments on four benchmarks confirm the guarantees: both variants match centralized ridge retraining to within $10^{-9}$ relative Frobenius error and complete each request at orders-of-magnitude lower cost than federated retraining baselines. |
| title | Exact Federated Continual Unlearning for Ridge Heads on Frozen Foundation Models |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12977 |