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Causal Fuzzing for Verifying Machine Unlearning

Software Engineering 2025-09-23 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

As machine learning models become increasingly embedded in decision-making systems, the ability to "unlearn" targeted data or features is crucial for enhancing model adaptability, fairness, and privacy in models which involves expensive training. To effectively guide machine unlearning, a thorough testing is essential. Existing methods for verification of machine unlearning provide limited insights, often failing in scenarios where the influence is indirect. In this work, we propose CAF\'E, a new causality based framework that unifies datapoint- and feature-level unlearning for verification of black-box ML models. CAF\'E evaluates both direct and indirect effects of unlearning targets through causal dependencies, providing actionable insights with fine-grained analysis. Our evaluation across five datasets and three model architectures demonstrates that CAF\'E successfully detects residual influence missed by baselines while maintaining computational efficiency.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.16525,
  title  = {Causal Fuzzing for Verifying Machine Unlearning},
  author = {Anna Mazhar and Sainyam Galhotra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.16525},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:46:54.911Z