arXiv Machine Learning By Hammad Rizwan, Mahtab Sarvmaili, Hassan Sajjad, Ga Wu

Instance-Level Difficulty: A Missing Perspective in Machine Unlearning

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The paper highlights that current deep machine unlearning research focuses on overall effectiveness, neglecting how difficult it is to unlearn individual training samples. It presents a detailed instance-level performance analysis across various algorithms and datasets, identifying four factors that make unlearning a data point hard. The study shows these factors are independent of the unlearning method but depend on the target model and its training data, urging future research to consider instance-level difficulty.

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