Learn to Unlearn for Deep Neural Networks: Minimizing Unlearning
  Interference with Gradient Projection
Tuan Hoang Santu Rana Sunil Gupta Svetha Venkatesh
Recent data-privacy laws have sparked interest in machine unlearning, which
involves removing the effect of specific training samples from a learnt model
as if they were never present in the original training dataset. The challenge
of machine unlearning is to discard information about the ``forget'' data in
the learnt model without altering the knowledge about the remaining dataset and
to do so more efficiently than the naive retraining approach. To achieve this,
we adopt a projected-gradient based learning method, named as
Projected-Gradient Unlearning (PGU), in which the model takes steps in the
orthogonal direction to the gradient subspaces deemed unimportant for the
retaining dataset, so as to its knowledge is preserved. By utilizing Stochastic
Gradient Descent (SGD) to update the model weights, our method can efficiently
scale to any model and dataset size. We provide empirically evidence to
demonstrate that our unlearning method can produce models that behave similar
to models retrained from scratch across various metrics even when the training
dataset is no longer accessible. Our code is available at
https://github.com/hnanhtuan/projected_gradient_unlearning.