The paper investigates continual machine unlearning, where models must forget data over time. It identifies a fundamental issue called plasticity collapse, where successive unlearning requests cause geometric constraints that saturate parameter space, leading to two failure modes: forward failure (reduced forgetting quality) and backward failure (re‑memorization). Experiments across architectures and datasets confirm that plasticity collapse is a pervasive problem in continual unlearning.
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.
arXiv:2601. 22012v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting in continual learning is often measured at the performance or last-layer representation level, overlooking the underlying mechanisms.
arXiv:2608. 01475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks that can grow or both grow and shrink during learning, referred to as growing neural networks and elastic neural networks, respectively, have recently been explored in offline continual learning with a particular focus on catastrophic forgetting.
The paper argues that catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity alone cannot explain why naive sequential training underperforms offline joint training. It introduces data co-observation as a third factor, showing that observing training data together consistently improves performance across supervised and self-supervised settings. The study also reinterprets common continual learning methods, suggesting that memory replay’s success stems from restoring co-observation benefits rather than merely mitigating forgetting.
arXiv:2606. 06032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting is commonly interpreted as the irreversible erasure of previously acquired knowledge during sequential learning.
arXiv:2512. 02657v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world deployment of text-to-image diffusion models requires continual concept removal as new privacy, copyright, or safety obligations arise over time.
arXiv:2606. 29832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of specific data from trained models to safeguard privacy.
arXiv:2603. 11201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The world is inherently dynamic, and continual learning aims to enable models to adapt to ever-evolving data streams.
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.
arXiv:2607. 13432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plasticity -- a neural network's ability to adapt to new tasks -- is critical for continual and transfer learning.
arXiv:2606. 03843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning methods aim to maximize the stability and plasticity of machine learning models that are trained on a sequence of tasks.
Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of specific data from trained models to safeguard privacy. However, this presents a significant challenge in the context of continual learning (CL), where models update sequentially on dynamic datasets.