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Machine unlearning is rapidly becoming a practical requirement, driven by privacy regulations, data errors, and the need to remove harmful or corrupted training samples. Despite this, most existing methods tackle the problem purely from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Sonia Laguna , Jorge da Silva Goncalves , Moritz Vandenhirtz , Alain Ryser , Irene Cannistraci , Julia E. Vogt

Machine unlearning has the potential to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs) by removing sensitive or harmful information post hoc. A key challenge in unlearning involves balancing between forget quality (effectively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Shengyuan Hu , Neil Kale , Pratiksha Thaker , Yiwei Fu , Steven Wu , Virginia Smith

Machine unlearning refers to removing the influence of a specified subset of training data from a machine learning model, efficiently, after it has already been trained. This is important for key applications, including making the model…

Ethical and privacy issues inherent in artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been a growing concern with the rapid spread of deep learning. Machine unlearning (MU) is the research area that addresses these issues by making a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Tomoya Yamashita , Masanori Yamada , Takashi Shibata

Machine unlearning aims to efficiently eliminate the memory about deleted data from trained models and address the right to be forgotten. Despite the success of existing unlearning algorithms, unlearning in sparse models has not yet been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Yang Xiao , Gen Li , Jie Ji , Ruimeng Ye , Xiaolong Ma , Bo Hui

As concerns around data privacy in machine learning grow, the ability to unlearn, or remove, specific data points from trained models becomes increasingly important. While state of the art unlearning methods have emerged in response, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Anat Kleiman , Robert Fisher , Ben Deaner , Udi Wieder

Machine unlearning is an emerging technology that removes a subset of the training data from a trained model without significantly affecting the model performance on the remaining data. This topic is becoming increasingly important in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Laiqiao Qin , Tianqing Zhu , Linlin Wang , Wanlei Zhou

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training samples from a trained model without full retraining. While prior work has largely focused on privacy-motivated settings, we recast unlearning as a general-purpose tool…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-11 George R. Nahass , Zhu Wang , Homa Rashidisabet , Won Hwa Kim , Sasha Hubschman , Jeffrey C. Peterson , Chad A. Purnell , Pete Setabutr , Ann Q. Tran , Darvin Yi , Sathya N. Ravi

This study investigates the machine unlearning techniques within the context of large language models (LLMs), referred to as \textit{LLM unlearning}. LLM unlearning offers a principled approach to removing the influence of undesirable data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiahui Geng , Qing Li , Herbert Woisetschlaeger , Zongxiong Chen , Fengyu Cai , Yuxia Wang , Preslav Nakov , Hans-Arno Jacobsen , Fakhri Karray

Machine learning has attracted widespread attention and evolved into an enabling technology for a wide range of highly successful applications, such as intelligent computer vision, speech recognition, medical diagnosis, and more. Yet a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Heng Xu , Tianqing Zhu , Lefeng Zhang , Wanlei Zhou , Philip S. Yu

Learning algorithms and data are the driving forces for machine learning to bring about tremendous transformation of industrial intelligence. However, individuals' right to retract their personal data and relevant data privacy regulations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Junde Li , Swaroop Ghosh

In Machine Learning, the emergence of \textit{the right to be forgotten} gave birth to a paradigm named \textit{machine unlearning}, which enables data holders to proactively erase their data from a trained model. Existing machine…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Yi Liu , Lei Xu , Xingliang Yuan , Cong Wang , Bo Li

Machine unlearning offers a practical alternative to avoid full model re-training by approximately removing the influence of specific user data. While existing methods certify unlearning via statistical indistinguishability from re-trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Hsiang Hsu , Pradeep Niroula , Zichang He , Ivan Brugere , Freddy Lecue , Chun-Fu Chen

Modern computer systems store vast amounts of personal data, enabling advances in AI and ML but risking user privacy and trust. For privacy reasons, it is sometimes desired for an ML model to forget part of the data it was trained on. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Amartya Hatua , Trung T. Nguyen , Filip Cano , Andrew H. Sung

Machine unlearning is a critical area of research aimed at safeguarding data privacy by enabling the removal of sensitive information from machine learning models. One unique challenge in this field is catastrophic unlearning, where erasing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Zhuoyi Peng , Yixuan Tang , Yi Yang

Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to selectively erase the influence of specific data points from pretrained models. However, most existing MU methods rely on the retain set to preserve model utility, which is often impractical due to privacy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Xindi Fan , Jing Wu , Mingyi Zhou , Pengwei Liang , Mehrtash Harandi , Dinh Phung

Machine unlearning, i.e. having a model forget about some of its training data, has become increasingly more important as privacy legislation promotes variants of the right-to-be-forgotten. In the context of deep learning, approaches for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Anvith Thudi , Hengrui Jia , Ilia Shumailov , Nicolas Papernot

Machine unlearning is gaining increasing attention as a way to remove adversarial data poisoning attacks from already trained models and to comply with privacy and AI regulations. The objective is to unlearn the effect of undesired data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Jose Miguel Lara Rangel , Stefan Schoepf , Jack Foster , David Krueger , Usman Anwar

There has been a growing interest in Machine Unlearning recently, primarily due to legal requirements such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act. Thus, multiple approaches were presented to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Alexander Becker , Thomas Liebig

We study the problem of unlearning datapoints from a learnt model. The learner first receives a dataset $S$ drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution, and outputs a model $\widehat{w}$ that performs well on unseen samples from the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Ayush Sekhari , Jayadev Acharya , Gautam Kamath , Ananda Theertha Suresh