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:2608.28934v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has traditionally been used to provide theoretical upper bounds on an algorithm's stability to changing its training data. In...
By Saloni Modi, Srivi Balaji, Yusong Zhu, Gautam Kamath, Kevin Tian
arXiv:2608. 04365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Audits have emerged as a critical instrument for algorithmic governance, providing a mechanism for external scrutiny and governance of machine learning models.
By Augustin Godinot, Sofiane Azogagh, Julien Ferry, S\'ebastien Gambs
Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge.
The paper investigates black-box privacy auditing for differentially private learning algorithms, focusing on DP‑SGD. It introduces a method that optimizes the auditor’s canary set using metagradient descent, improving empirical lower bounds on privacy parameters compared to prior canary designs. The approach is shown to be DP‑SGD agnostic and efficient, with optimized canaries for small models remaining effective for larger DP‑SGD models.
By Matteo Boglioni, Terrance Liu, Andrew Ilyas, Zhiwei Steven Wu
arXiv:2606. 16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements.
By Dayong Ye, Tianqing Zhu, Ruiding Huang, Xinbo Fu, Jiayang Li, Bo Liu, Huan Huo, Wanlei Zhou