machine unlearning
Fast Model DeBias with Machine Unlearning
Recent discoveries have revealed that deep neural networks might behave in a biased manner in many real-world scenarios. For instance, deep networks trained on a large-scale face recognition dataset CelebA tend to predict blonde hair for females and black hair for males. Such biases not only jeopardize the robustness of models but also perpetuate and amplify social biases, which is especially concerning for automated decision-making processes in healthcare, recruitment, etc., as they could exacerbate unfair economic and social inequalities among different groups. Existing debiasing methods suffer from high costs in bias labeling or model re-training, while also exhibiting a deficiency in terms of elucidating the origins of biases within the model. To this respect, we propose a fast model debiasing method (FMD) which offers an efficient approach to identify, evaluate and remove biases inherent in trained models. The FMD identifies biased attributes through an explicit counterfactual concept and quantifies the influence of data samples with influence functions. Moreover, we design a machine unlearning-based strategy to efficiently and effectively remove the bias in a trained model with a small counterfactual dataset. Experiments on the Colored MNIST, CelebA, and Adult Income datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior or competing classification accuracies compared with state-of-the-art retraining-based methods while attaining significantly fewer biases and requiring much less debiasing cost. Notably, our method requires only a small external dataset and updating a minimal amount of model parameters, without the requirement of access to training data that may be too large or unavailable in practice.
Machine Unlearning of Traffic State Estimation and Prediction
Wang, Xin, Rockafellar, R. Tyrrell, Xuegang, null, Ban, null
Traffic State Estimation and Prediction (TSEP) has been extensively studied to reconstruct traffic state variables (e.g., flow, density, speed, travel time, etc.) using (partial) observed traffic data (Antoniou et al., 2013; Ban et al., 2011; Shi et al., 2021; Li et al., 2020). In recent years, advancements in data collection technologies have enabled TSEP methods to integrate traffic data from diverse sources for more accurate and robust estimation and prediction (Wang et al., 2016; Makridis and Kouvelas, 2023). These data sources can be broadly categorized into infrastructure-collected data and user-contributed data. Infrastructure-collected data typically includes information collected from loop detectors, traffic cameras, and radars installed on roadways or at intersections. In contrast, user-contributed data is derived from individuals, often through vehicles or personal devices, such as GPS traces, vehicle trajectories, and probe data collected via mobile apps or in-vehicle systems.
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Machine Unlearning for Responsible and Adaptive AI in Education
Mayeku, Betty, Hummel, Sandra, Memarmoshrefi, Parisa
Machine Unlearning (MU) has emerged as a promising approach to addressing persistent challenges in Machine Learning (ML) systems. By enabling the selective removal of learned data, MU introduces protective, corrective, and adaptive capabilities that are central to advancing Responsible and Adaptive AI. However, despite its growing prominence in other domains, MU remains underexplored within education, a sector uniquely characterized by sensitive learner data, dynamic environments, and the high-stakes implications of algorithmic decision-making. This paper examines the potential of MU as both a mechanism for operationalizing Responsible AI principles and a foundation for Adaptive AI in ML-driven educational systems. Drawing on a structured review of 42 peer-reviewed studies, the paper analyzes key MU mechanisms and technical variants, and how they contribute to the practical realization of Responsible and Adaptive AI. Four core intervention domains where MU demonstrates significant promise are identified: privacy protection, resilience to adversarial or corrupted data, fairness through bias mitigation, and adaptability to evolving contexts. Furthermore, MU interventions are mapped to the technical, ethical, and pedagogical challenges inherent in educational AI. This mapping illustrates the role of MU as a strategic mechanism for enhancing compliance, reinforcing ethical safeguards, and supporting adaptability by ensuring that models remain flexible, maintainable, and contextually relevant over time. As a conceptual contribution, the paper introduces MU4RAAI, a reference architecture integrating MU within Responsible and Adaptive AI frameworks for educational contexts. MU is thus positioned not merely as a data deletion process but as a transformative approach for ensuring that educational AI systems remain ethical, adaptive, and trustworthy.
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Probing then Editing: A Push-Pull Framework for Retain-Free Machine Unlearning in Industrial IoT
Chen, Jiao, Li, Weihua, Tang, Jianhua
In dynamic Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, models need the ability to selectively forget outdated or erroneous knowledge. However, existing methods typically rely on retain data to constrain model behavior, which increases computational and energy burdens and conflicts with industrial data silos and privacy compliance requirements. To address this, we propose a novel retain-free unlearning framework, referred to as Probing then Editing (PTE). PTE frames unlearning as a probe-edit process: first, it probes the decision boundary neighborhood of the model on the to-be-forgotten class via gradient ascent and generates corresponding editing instructions using the model's own predictions. Subsequently, a push-pull collaborative optimization is performed: the push branch actively dismantles the decision region of the target class using the editing instructions, while the pull branch applies masked knowledge distillation to anchor the model's knowledge on retained classes to their original states. Benefiting from this mechanism, PTE achieves efficient and balanced knowledge editing using only the to-be-forgotten data and the original model. Experimental results demonstrate that PTE achieves an excellent balance between unlearning effectiveness and model utility across multiple general and industrial benchmarks such as CWRU and SCUT-FD.
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Protecting the Neural Networks against FGSM Attack Using Machine Unlearning
Khorasani, Amir Hossein, Jahanian, Ali, Rastgarpour, Maryam
Machine learning is a powerful tool for building predictive models. However, it is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) attacks are a common type of adversarial attack that adds small perturbations to input data to trick a model into misclassifying it. In response to these attacks, researchers have developed methods for "unlearning" these attacks, which involves retraining a model on the original data without the added perturbations. Machine unlearning is a technique that tries to "forget" specific data points from the training dataset, to improve the robustness of a machine learning model against adversarial attacks like FGSM. In this paper, we focus on applying unlearning techniques to the LeNet neural network, a popular architecture for image classification. We evaluate the efficacy of unlearning FGSM attacks on the LeNet network and find that it can significantly improve its robustness against these types of attacks.
Controllable Machine Unlearning via Gradient Pivoting
Hwang, Youngsik, Lim, Dong-Young
Machine unlearning (MU) aims to remove the influence of specific data from a trained model. However, approximate unlearning methods, often formulated as a single-objective optimization (SOO) problem, face a critical trade-off between unlearning efficacy and model fidelity. This leads to three primary challenges: the risk of over-forgetting, a lack of fine-grained control over the unlearning process, and the absence of metrics to holistically evaluate the trade-off. To address these issues, we reframe MU as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. We then introduce a novel algorithm, Controllable Unlearning by Pivoting Gradient (CUP), which features a unique pivoting mechanism. Unlike traditional MOO methods that converge to a single solution, CUP's mechanism is designed to controllably navigate the entire Pareto frontier. This navigation is governed by a single intuitive hyperparameter, the `unlearning intensity', which allows for precise selection of a desired trade-off. To evaluate this capability, we adopt the hypervolume indicator, a metric that captures both the quality and diversity of the entire set of solutions an algorithm can generate. Our experimental results demonstrate that CUP produces a superior set of Pareto-optimal solutions, consistently outperforming existing methods across various vision tasks.
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Preserving Cross-Modal Stability for Visual Unlearning in Multimodal Scenarios
Li, Jinghan Xu Yuyang Zhang Qixuan Cai Jiancheng Chen Keqiu
Visual modality is the most vulnerable to privacy leakage in real-world multimodal applications like autonomous driving with visual and radar data; Machine unlearning removes specific training data from pre-trained models to address privacy leakage, however, existing methods fail to preserve cross-modal knowledge and maintain intra-class structural stability of retain data, leading to reduced overall and other modalities' performance during visual unlearning; to address these challenges, we propose a Cross-modal Contrastive Unlearning (CCU) framework, which integrates three key components: (a) selective visual unlearning: employing inverse contrastive learning to dissociate visual representations from their original semantics, (b) cross-modal knowledge retention: preserving other modalities' discriminability through semantic consistency, and (c) dual-set contrastive separation: preserving the model performance via isolation of structural perturbations between the unlearn set and retain set; extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of CCU, and our method achieves a 7.12% accuracy improvement with only 7% of the unlearning time compared to the top-accuracy baseline.
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An Unlearning Framework for Continual Learning
Adhikari, Sayanta, Kumaravelu, Vishnuprasadh, Srijith, P. K.
Growing concerns surrounding AI safety and data privacy have driven the development of Machine Unlearning as a potential solution. However, current machine unlearning algorithms are designed to complement the offline training paradigm. The emergence of the Continual Learning (CL) paradigm promises incremental model updates, enabling models to learn new tasks sequentially. Naturally, some of those tasks may need to be unlearned to address safety or privacy concerns that might arise. We find that applying conventional unlearning algorithms in continual learning environments creates two critical problems: performance degradation on retained tasks and task relapse, where previously unlearned tasks resurface during subsequent learning. Furthermore, most unlearning algorithms require data to operate, which conflicts with CL's philosophy of discarding past data. A clear need arises for unlearning algorithms that are data-free and mindful of future learning. To that end, we propose UnCLe, an Unlearning framework for Continual Learning. UnCLe employs a hypernetwork that learns to generate task-specific network parameters, using task embeddings. Tasks are unlearned by aligning the corresponding generated network parameters with noise, without requiring any data. Empirical evaluations on several vision data sets demonstrate UnCLe's ability to sequentially perform multiple learning and unlearning operations with minimal disruption to previously acquired knowledge.
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Bias-Aware Machine Unlearning: Towards Fairer Vision Models via Controllable Forgetting
Aylapuram, Sai Siddhartha Chary, Elluru, Veeraraju, Agarwal, Shivang
Deep neural networks often rely on spurious correlations in training data, leading to biased or unfair predictions in safety-critical domains such as medicine and autonomous driving. While conventional bias mitigation typically requires retraining from scratch or redesigning data pipelines, recent advances in machine unlearning provide a promising alternative for post-hoc model correction. In this work, we investigate \textit{Bias-Aware Machine Unlearning}, a paradigm that selectively removes biased samples or feature representations to mitigate diverse forms of bias in vision models. Building on privacy-preserving unlearning techniques, we evaluate various strategies including Gradient Ascent, LoRA, and Teacher-Student distillation. Through empirical analysis on three benchmark datasets, CUB-200-2011 (pose bias), CIFAR-10 (synthetic patch bias), and CelebA (gender bias in smile detection), we demonstrate that post-hoc unlearning can substantially reduce subgroup disparities, with improvements in demographic parity of up to \textbf{94.86\%} on CUB-200, \textbf{30.28\%} on CIFAR-10, and \textbf{97.37\%} on CelebA. These gains are achieved with minimal accuracy loss and with methods scoring an average of 0.62 across the 3 settings on the joint evaluation of utility, fairness, quality, and privacy. Our findings establish machine unlearning as a practical framework for enhancing fairness in deployed vision systems without necessitating full retraining.
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Unleashing Uncertainty: Efficient Machine Unlearning for Generative AI
Spartalis, Christoforos N., Semertzidis, Theodoros, Daras, Petros, Gavves, Efstratios
We introduce SAFEMax, a novel method for Machine Unlearning in diffusion models. Grounded in information-theoretic principles, SAFEMax maximizes the entropy in generated images, causing the model to generate Gaussian noise when conditioned on impermissible classes by ultimately halting its denoising process. Also, our method controls the balance between forgetting and retention by selectively focusing on the early diffusion steps, where class-specific information is prominent. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SAFEMax and highlight its substantial efficiency gains over state-of-the-art methods.
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