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Abstract
Machine unlearning is a prominent and challenging field, driven by regulatory
demands for user data deletion and heightened privacy awareness. Existing
approaches involve retraining model or multiple finetuning steps for each
deletion request, often constrained by computational limits and restricted data
access. In this work, we introduce a novel class unlearning algorithm designed
to strategically eliminate specific classes from the learned model. Our
algorithm first estimates the Retain and the Forget Spaces using Singular Value
Decomposition on the layerwise activations for a small subset of samples from
the retain and unlearn classes, respectively. We then compute the shared
information between these spaces and remove it from the forget space to isolate
class-discriminatory feature space. Finally, we obtain the unlearned model by
updating the weights to suppress the class discriminatory features from the
activation spaces. We demonstrate our algorithm's efficacy on ImageNet using a
Vision Transformer with only $\sim 1.5\%$ drop in retain accuracy compared to
the original model while maintaining under $1\%$ accuracy on the unlearned
class samples. Furthermore, our algorithm exhibits competitive unlearning
performance and resilience against Membership Inference Attacks (MIA). Compared
to baselines, it achieves an average accuracy improvement of $1.38\%$ on the
ImageNet dataset while requiring up to $10 \times$ fewer samples for
unlearning. Additionally, under stronger MIA attacks on the CIFAR-100 dataset
using a ResNet18 architecture, our approach outperforms the best baseline by
$1.8\%$. Our code is available at
https://github.com/sangamesh-kodge/class_forgetting.