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Toward Efficient Data-Free Unlearning

Machine Learning 2024-12-19 v1

Abstract

Machine unlearning without access to real data distribution is challenging. The existing method based on data-free distillation achieved unlearning by filtering out synthetic samples containing forgetting information but struggled to distill the retaining-related knowledge efficiently. In this work, we analyze that such a problem is due to over-filtering, which reduces the synthesized retaining-related information. We propose a novel method, Inhibited Synthetic PostFilter (ISPF), to tackle this challenge from two perspectives: First, the Inhibited Synthetic, by reducing the synthesized forgetting information; Second, the PostFilter, by fully utilizing the retaining-related information in synthesized samples. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ISPF effectively tackles the challenge and outperforms existing methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.13790,
  title  = {Toward Efficient Data-Free Unlearning},
  author = {Chenhao Zhang and Shaofei Shen and Weitong Chen and Miao Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.13790},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

15 pages, 10 figures, accepted by AAAI 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:40:23.415Z