arXiv Machine Learning

When Forgetting is not Catastrophic: On the Mechanics of Spurious Forgetting

arXiv AI
Sep 1

On the Plasticity Collapse in Continual Machine Unlearning

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.

By Yingdan Shi, Xiang Xu, Kaize Ding, Alfred O. Hero, Ren Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 3

PURGE: Projected Unlearning via Retain-Guided Erasure

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