Papers › Unified Gradient-Based Machine Unlearning with Remain Geometry Enhancement

Unified Gradient-Based Machine Unlearning with Remain Geometry Enhancement

29 Sep 2024arXiv:2409.19732archive 2025-07-28

Zhehao Huang, Xinwen Cheng, JingHao Zheng, Haoran Wang, Zhengbao He, Tao Li, Xiaolin Huang

Machine unlearning (MU) has emerged to enhance the privacy and trustworthiness of deep neural networks. Approximate MU is a practical method for large-scale models. Our investigation into approximate MU starts with identifying the steepest descent direction, minimizing the output Kullback-Leibler divergence to exact MU inside a parameters' neighborhood. This probed direction decomposes into three components: weighted forgetting gradient ascent, fine-tuning retaining gradient descent, and a weight saliency matrix. Such decomposition derived from Euclidean metric encompasses most existing gradient-based MU methods. Nevertheless, adhering to Euclidean space may result in sub-optimal iterative trajectories due to the overlooked geometric structure of the output probability space. We suggest embedding the unlearning update into a manifold rendered by the remaining geometry, incorporating second-order Hessian from the remaining data. It helps prevent effective unlearning from interfering with the retained performance. However, computing the second-order Hessian for large-scale models is intractable. To efficiently leverage the benefits of Hessian modulation, we propose a fast-slow parameter update strategy to implicitly approximate the up-to-date salient unlearning direction. Free from specific modal constraints, our approach is adaptable across computer vision unlearning tasks, including classification and generation. Extensive experiments validate our efficacy and efficiency. Notably, our method successfully performs class-forgetting on ImageNet using DiT and forgets a class on CIFAR-10 using DDPM in just 50 steps, compared to thousands of steps required by previous methods.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

26 samples harvested; 12 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 14 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 3 of the 26 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from 4 repositories linked to this paper, official or community; each sample names its own and says which. Some samples are identical code Syntology first harvested from another repository; for those, this paper's copy is not located and its licence is not recorded. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections