ARCANE: An Efficient Architecture for Exact Machine Unlearning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently users’ right-to-be-forgotten is stipulated by many laws and regulations. However, only removing the data from the dataset is not enough, as machine learning models would memorize the training data once the data is involved in model training, increasing the risk of exposing users’ privacy. To solve this problem, currently, the straightforward method, naive retraining, is to discard these data and retrain the model from scratch, which is reliable but brings much computational and time overhead. In this paper, we propose an exact unlearning architecture called ARCANE. Based on ensemble learning, we transform the naive retraining into multiple one-class classification tasks to reduce retraining cost while ensuring model performance, especially in the case of a large number of unlearning requests not considered by previous works. Then we further introduce data preprocessing methods to reduce the retraining overhead and speed up the unlearning, which includes representative data selection for redundancy removal, training state saving to reuse previous calculation results, and sorting to cope with unlearning requests of different distributions. We extensively evaluate ARCANE on three typical datasets with three common model architectures. Experiment results show the effectiveness and superiority of ARCANE over both the naive retraining and the state-of-the-art method in terms of model performance and unlearning speed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".