arXiv Machine Learning

Auditing Machine Unlearning: A Systematic Research on Whether Models Truly Forget

arXiv:2606. 16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Characterizing Privacy-Audit Alignment in Behavioral Audit of Machine Unlearning

The paper investigates the privacy risks inherent in auditing machine unlearning (MU) when the audit relies only on querying the model for behavioral signals. It shows that such generic audit schemes inevitably leak information about the retained data set, providing a geometric transfer theorem that bounds the distinguishability of retained set membership based on audit accuracy. The study also analyzes how the unlearned set, target sample, and query protocol influence the privacy‑audit transfer coefficient, with empirical evidence from both convex and non‑convex models supporting the theoretical findings.

By Liou Tang, James Joshi, Ashish Kundu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

PreUnlearn: Auditing Collateral Knowledge Damage Before Large Language Model Unlearning

The paper investigates how machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) can unintentionally erase related knowledge, even in distant domains. By analyzing the propagation of unlearning effects before any model updates, the authors discover a consistent decay pattern where collateral damage is strongest near the targeted forget set and diminishes with semantic distance but never fully disappears at domain boundaries. They propose a pre-unlearning prediction task—forget-set auditing—to identify potential collateral damage early, finding that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set are the most predictive signals. This approach offers an early warning system for risky unlearning runs and guides the design of more reliable unlearning procedures.

By Bo Su, Ankit Shah, Thai Le
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Efficient Unlearning with Privacy Guarantees

arXiv:2507. 04771v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Privacy protection laws, such as the GDPR, grant individuals the right to request the forgetting of their personal data not only from databases but also from machine learning (ML) models trained on them.

By Josep Domingo-Ferrer, Najeeb Jebreel, David S\'anchez