The paper investigates whether a model that has undergone class unlearning can still recover forgotten classes without access to original data. It introduces a white‑box audit method that generates synthetic probes in representation space, filters them by confidence, and relabels boundary‑adjacent probes as the forgotten class. The authors define a Relearning Score to quantify recovery while preserving retain performance, and demonstrate that several unlearning techniques on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, and TinyImageNet can be fully recovered in a source‑free setting, sometimes even outperforming a retrained reference.
By Zahra Dehghani, Pablo Piantanida, Mohammadhadi Shateri
arXiv:2606. 29465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Class-incremental learning requires a model to learn new classes while preserving decision regions for old ones.
By Weizhi Nie, Hui Wang, Weijie Wang, Yuting Su
arXiv:2605. 20282v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) has attracted growing interest, yet existing methods certify forgetting solely using output-level metrics.
By Zhenyu Yu, Yangchen Zeng, Chunlei Meng, Guangzhen Yao, Shuigeng Zhou
Reference-Guided Machine Unlearning (ReGUn) is a vision unlearning framework that prioritizes distributional indistinguishability over degradation-based heuristics. It uses disjoint held-out data to create a class-conditioned reference distribution for distillation, guiding forget samples toward non-member behavior without explicitly degrading predictions. Experiments across various architectures and datasets show that ReGUn achieves a competitive forgetting–utility trade-off and closely matches retrain-like membership inference behavior.
By Jonas Mirlach, Sonia Laguna, Julia E. Vogt
arXiv:2606. 03808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose PURGE, a machine unlearning algorithm built on a simple but an under-exploited observation: continual learning (CL) and machine unlearning (MU) which are fundamentally dual problems.
By Vedant Jawandhia, Daksh Ahuja, Ghufran Alam Siddiqui, Prashant Trivedi, Yash Sinha, Pratik Narang
The paper investigates what information must be preserved in replay buffers for class‑incremental learning. By treating cached predictions as temporally heterogeneous supervision, the authors separate classes known at storage time from those learned later, and evaluate the impact of deleting logit matching. Experiments on CIFAR‑100 with DER++ show that a simple task‑level offset can largely correct the cost of removing later‑class matching, while the cost of disrupting class correspondence remains.
By BoRen Deng, Xiangyue Ma, Chenglong Li, Xiaoting Du
arXiv:2507. 07754v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine unlearning is usually evaluated by what the classifier outputs: forget-set accuracy, confidence, membership-inference scores.
By Jaeheun Jung, Bosung Jung, Suhyun Bae, Donghun Lee
arXiv:2610.31786v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) aims to remove a designated target client's influence from a trained model without the prohibitive cost of retraining from sc...
By Thanh Linh Nguyen, Quoc-Viet Pham
arXiv:2607. 12204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention can be viewed as an online learner over context, yet existing test-time memories cannot certify that dropping a token leaves outputs unchanged or delete its influence outright.
By Vishwajith Ramesh
arXiv:2605. 07482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to selectively remove memorized content such as private data, copyrighted text, or hazardous knowledge, without costly full retraining.
By Zizhao Hu, Ameya Godbole, Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei, Mohammad Rostami, Jesse Thomason, Robin Jia
The paper introduces a Fisher-guided submodular data selection method for continual pre‑training of large language models, addressing the forgetting problem that arises when a target‑domain corpus overwrites pretrained knowledge. By decomposing candidate gradients into anchor and frontier components and optimizing a log‑determinant submodular objective, the method selects data that both improves target‑domain performance and limits forgetting. Experiments on TinyLlama‑1.1B and Llama‑3.1‑8B show that the selector achieves superior adaptation and forgetting control while using ten times fewer tokens than traditional replay strategies.
By Zhenghao Zhao, Gaowen Liu, Zhiling Lan, Yan Yan
The paper introduces Unmerge, an efficient machine unlearning algorithm that treats unlearning as the inverse of task arithmetic. By representing the forget component as a low‑rank basis at each layer, Unmerge optimizes three goals—matching the merged vector, suppressing leakage, and bounding correction size—to limit forget leakage and retain damage. Experiments on ResNet‑50, ViT‑S/16, and Llama‑3.2‑3B show significant performance gains over existing methods while maintaining privacy and feature‑distribution fidelity.
By Haoran Tang, Andrew Tan, Rajiv Khanna