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Poster

Hessian-Free Online Certified Unlearning

Xinbao Qiao · Meng Zhang · Ming Tang · Ermin Wei

Hall 3 + Hall 2B #472
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Sat 26 Apr midnight PDT — 2:30 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

Machine unlearning strives to uphold the data owners' right to be forgotten by enabling models to selectively forget specific data. Recent advances suggest pre-computing and storing statistics extracted from second-order information and implementing unlearning through Newton-style updates.However, the Hessian matrix operations are extremely costly and previous works conduct unlearning for empirical risk minimizer with the convexity assumption, precluding their applicability to high-dimensional over-parameterized models and the nonconvergence condition.In this paper, we propose an efficient Hessian-free unlearning approach. The key idea is to maintain a statistical vector for each training data, computed through affine stochastic recursion of the difference between the retrained and learned models. We prove that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the unlearning and generalization guarantees, the deletion capacity, and the time/storage complexity, under the same regularity conditions.Through the strategy of recollecting statistics for removing data, we develop an online unlearning algorithm that achieves near-instantaneous data removal, as it requires only vector addition.Experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme surpasses existing results by orders of magnitude in terms of time/storage costs with millisecond-level unlearning execution, while also enhancing test accuracy.

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