Partially Blinded Unlearning: Class Unlearning for Deep Networks a Bayesian Perspective

TL;DR

This paper introduces Partially-Blinded Unlearning (PBU), a Bayesian-based method for efficiently removing specific class information from deep networks, reducing data retention needs while maintaining overall model performance.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel Bayesian formulation for class unlearning that minimizes data-specific likelihoods and employs stability regularization, outperforming existing methods without full dataset access.

Findings

PBU effectively degrades performance on unlearned classes.

PBU outperforms state-of-the-art class unlearning methods.

Requires only unlearned data points, not entire dataset.

Abstract

In order to adhere to regulatory standards governing individual data privacy and safety, machine learning models must systematically eliminate information derived from specific subsets of a user's training data that can no longer be utilized. The emerging discipline of Machine Unlearning has arisen as a pivotal area of research, facilitating the process of selectively discarding information designated to specific sets or classes of data from a pre-trained model, thereby eliminating the necessity for extensive retraining from scratch. The principal aim of this study is to formulate a methodology tailored for the purposeful elimination of information linked to a specific class of data from a pre-trained classification network. This intentional removal is crafted to degrade the model's performance specifically concerning the unlearned data class while concurrently minimizing any detrimental impacts on the model's performance in other classes. To achieve this goal, we frame the class unlearning problem from a Bayesian perspective, which yields a loss function that minimizes the log-likelihood associated with the unlearned data with a stability regularization in parameter space. This stability regularization incorporates Mohalanobis distance with respect to the Fisher Information matrix and $l_2$ distance from the pre-trained model parameters. Our novel approach, termed \textbf{Partially-Blinded Unlearning (PBU)}, surpasses existing state-of-the-art class unlearning methods, demonstrating superior effectiveness. Notably, PBU achieves this efficacy without requiring awareness of the entire training dataset but only to the unlearned data points, marking a distinctive feature of its performance.