retrain 0
Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift
Zhou, Yanfei, Fathony, Rizal, Nguyen, Nam H., Sesia, Matteo
We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies -- one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees -- and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.
Learning to Fast Unrank in Collaborative Filtering Recommendation
Zhao, Junpeng, Li, Lin, Li, Ming, Bhuiyan, Amran, Huang, Jimmy
Modern data-driven recommendation systems risk memorizing sensitive user behavioral patterns, raising privacy concerns. Existing recommendation unlearning methods, while capable of removing target data influence, suffer from inefficient unlearning speed and degraded performance, failing to meet real-time unlearning demands. Considering the ranking-oriented nature of recommendation systems, we present unranking, the process of reducing the ranking positions of target items while ensuring the formal guarantees of recommendation unlearning. To achieve efficient unranking, we propose Learning to Fast Unrank in Collaborative Filtering Recommendation (L2UnRank), which operates through three key stages: (a) identifying the influenced scope via interaction-based p-hop propagation, (b) computing structural and semantic influences for entities within this scope, and (c) performing efficient, ranking-aware parameter updates guided by influence information. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and backbone models demonstrate L2UnRank's model-agnostic nature, achieving state-of-the-art unranking effectiveness and maintaining recommendation quality comparable to retraining, while also delivering a 50x speedup over existing methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/Juniper42/L2UnRank.
Advancing 3D Medical Image Segmentation: Unleashing the Potential of Planarian Neural Networks in Artificial Intelligence
Huang, Ziyuan, Huggins, Kevin, Bellur, Srikar
Author Note Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ziyuan Huang, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, 368 Plantation Street, Worcester, MA 01605 . Advancing 3D Medical Image Segmentation: Unleashing the Potential of Planarian Neural Networks in Artificial Intelligence Abstract Our study presents PNN - UNet as a method fo r constructing deep neural networks that replicate the planarian neural network (PNN) structure in the context of 3D medical image data. Planarians typically have a cerebral structure comprising two neural cords, where the cerebrum acts as a coordinator, and the neural cords serve slightly different purposes within the organism's neurological system. Accordingly, PNN - UNet comprises a D eep - UNet and a W ide - UNet as the nerve cords, with a densely connected autoencoder performing the role of the brain. This dist inct architecture offers advantages over both monolithic (UNet) and modular networks (Ensemble - UNet). Our outcomes on a 3D MRI hippocampus dataset, with and without data augmentation, demonstrate that PNN - UNet outperforms the baseline UNet and several othe r UNet variants in image segmentation. Introduction Medical image segmentation using deep learning techniques plays an increasingly crucial role in assisting clinical diagnosis. Every day, hospitals capture exponentially more medical images, making it increasingly difficult to process big data efficiently and effectively. Medical imaging segmentation can be classified into three major categories: 2D, 2.5D, and 3D (Minaee et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022) . The 2D method is to segment 3D images slice - by - slice, utilizing 2D slices as training and testing data. For the 2.5D category, segmentation algorithms usually segment 3D images slice - by - slice, adding neighboring slices as additional inputs. Lastly, 3D im ages are cropped and segmented into small cubic images for training and testing. It is important to note that different methods have their advantages and disadvantages in 3D medical image segmentation.
Reproducibility Companion Paper: Making Users Indistinguishable: Attribute-wise Unlearning in Recommender Systems
Li, Yuyuan, Fang, Junjie, Chen, Chaochao, Zheng, Xiaolin, Zhang, Yizhao, Han, Zhongxuan
In this paper, we reproduce the experimental results presented in our previous work titled "Making Users Indistinguishable: Attribute-wise Unlearning in Recommender Systems," which was published in the proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia. This paper aims to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method and help others reproduce our experimental results. We provide detailed descriptions of our preprocessed datasets, source code structure, configuration file settings, experimental environment, and reproduced experimental results.
Underestimated Privacy Risks for Minority Populations in Large Language Model Unlearning
Wei, Rongzhe, Li, Mufei, Ghassemi, Mohsen, Kreačić, Eleonora, Li, Yifan, Yue, Xiang, Li, Bo, Potluru, Vamsi K., Li, Pan, Chien, Eli
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on extensive datasets that often contain sensitive, human-generated information, raising significant concerns about privacy breaches. While certified unlearning approaches offer strong privacy guarantees, they rely on restrictive model assumptions that are not applicable to LLMs. As a result, various unlearning heuristics have been proposed, with the associated privacy risks assessed only empirically. The standard evaluation pipelines typically randomly select data for removal from the training set, apply unlearning techniques, and use membership inference attacks (MIAs) to compare the unlearned models against models retrained without the to-be-unlearned data. However, since every data point is subject to the right to be forgotten, unlearning should be considered in the worst-case scenario from the privacy perspective. Prior work shows that data outliers may exhibit higher memorization effects. Intuitively, they are harder to be unlearn and thus the privacy risk of unlearning them is overlooked and underestimated in the current evaluation. In this paper, we leverage minority data to identify such a critical flaw in previously widely adopted evaluations. We substantiate this claim through carefully designed experiments, including unlearning canaries related to minority groups, inspired by privacy auditing literature. Using personally identifiable information (PII) as a representative minority identifier, we demonstrate that minority groups experience at least 20% more privacy leakage in most cases across six unlearning approaches, three MIAs, three benchmark datasets, and two LLMs of different scales. Given that the right to be forgotten should be upheld for every individual, we advocate for a more rigorous evaluation of LLM unlearning methods. Our minority-aware evaluation framework represents an initial step toward ensuring more equitable and thorough assessments of LLM unlearning efficacy.
Towards Federated Domain Unlearning: Verification Methodologies and Challenges
Tam, Kahou, Xu, Kewei, Li, Li, Fu, Huazhu
Federated Learning (FL) has evolved as a powerful tool for collaborative model training across multiple entities, ensuring data privacy in sensitive sectors such as healthcare and finance. However, the introduction of the Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) poses new challenges, necessitating federated unlearning to delete data without full model retraining. Traditional FL unlearning methods, not originally designed with domain specificity in mind, inadequately address the complexities of multi-domain scenarios, often affecting the accuracy of models in non-targeted domains or leading to uniform forgetting across all domains. Our work presents the first comprehensive empirical study on Federated Domain Unlearning, analyzing the characteristics and challenges of current techniques in multi-domain contexts. We uncover that these methods falter, particularly because they neglect the nuanced influences of domain-specific data, which can lead to significant performance degradation and inaccurate model behavior. Our findings reveal that unlearning disproportionately affects the model's deeper layers, erasing critical representational subspaces acquired during earlier training phases. In response, we propose novel evaluation methodologies tailored for Federated Domain Unlearning, aiming to accurately assess and verify domain-specific data erasure without compromising the model's overall integrity and performance. This investigation not only highlights the urgent need for domain-centric unlearning strategies in FL but also sets a new precedent for evaluating and implementing these techniques effectively.
On the Effectiveness of Unlearning in Session-Based Recommendation
Xin, Xin, Yang, Liu, Zhao, Ziqi, Ren, Pengjie, Chen, Zhumin, Ma, Jun, Ren, Zhaochun
Session-based recommendation predicts users' future interests from previous interactions in a session. Despite the memorizing of historical samples, the request of unlearning, i.e., to remove the effect of certain training samples, also occurs for reasons such as user privacy or model fidelity. However, existing studies on unlearning are not tailored for the session-based recommendation. On the one hand, these approaches cannot achieve satisfying unlearning effects due to the collaborative correlations and sequential connections between the unlearning item and the remaining items in the session. On the other hand, seldom work has conducted the research to verify the unlearning effectiveness in the session-based recommendation scenario. In this paper, we propose SRU, a session-based recommendation unlearning framework, which enables high unlearning efficiency, accurate recommendation performance, and improved unlearning effectiveness in session-based recommendation. Specifically, we first partition the training sessions into separate sub-models according to the similarity across the sessions, then we utilize an attention-based aggregation layer to fuse the hidden states according to the correlations between the session and the centroid of the data in the sub-model. To improve the unlearning effectiveness, we further propose three extra data deletion strategies, including collaborative extra deletion (CED), neighbor extra deletion (NED), and random extra deletion (RED). Besides, we propose an evaluation metric that measures whether the unlearning sample can be inferred after the data deletion to verify the unlearning effectiveness. We implement SRU with three representative session-based recommendation models and conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.
Improving the Accuracy of Global Forecasting Models using Time Series Data Augmentation
Bandara, Kasun, Hewamalage, Hansika, Liu, Yuan-Hao, Kang, Yanfei, Bergmeir, Christoph
Forecasting models that are trained across sets of many time series, known as Global Forecasting Models (GFM), have shown recently promising results in forecasting competitions and real-world applications, outperforming many state-of-the-art univariate forecasting techniques. In most cases, GFMs are implemented using deep neural networks, and in particular Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), which require a sufficient amount of time series to estimate their numerous model parameters. However, many time series databases have only a limited number of time series. In this study, we propose a novel, data augmentation based forecasting framework that is capable of improving the baseline accuracy of the GFM models in less data-abundant settings. We use three time series augmentation techniques: GRATIS, moving block bootstrap (MBB), and dynamic time warping barycentric averaging (DBA) to synthetically generate a collection of time series. The knowledge acquired from these augmented time series is then transferred to the original dataset using two different approaches: the pooled approach and the transfer learning approach. When building GFMs, in the pooled approach, we train a model on the augmented time series alongside the original time series dataset, whereas in the transfer learning approach, we adapt a pre-trained model to the new dataset. In our evaluation on competition and real-world time series datasets, our proposed variants can significantly improve the baseline accuracy of GFM models and outperform state-of-the-art univariate forecasting methods.