Learning to Rewind via Iterative Prediction of Past Weights for Practical Unlearning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In artificial intelligence (AI), many legal conflicts have arisen, especially concerning privacy and copyright associated with training data. When an AI model's training data incurs privacy concerns, it becomes imperative to develop a new model devoid of influences from such contentious data. However, retraining from scratch is often not viable due to the extensive data requirements and heavy computational costs. Machine unlearning presents a promising solution by enabling the selective erasure of specific knowledge from models. Despite its potential, many existing approaches in machine unlearning are based on scenarios that are either impractical or could lead to unintended degradation of model performance. We utilize the concept of weight prediction to approximate the less-learned weights based on observations about further training. By repetition of 1) finetuning on specific data and 2) weight prediction, our work gradually eliminates knowledge about the specific data. We verify its ability to eliminate side effects caused by problematic data and show its effectiveness across various architectures, datasets, and tasks.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".