Machine Unlearning: A Survey
Heng Xu Tianqing Zhu Lefeng Zhang Wanlei Zhou Philip S. Yu
Machine learning has attracted widespread attention and evolved into an
enabling technology for a wide range of highly successful applications, such as
intelligent computer vision, speech recognition, medical diagnosis, and more.
Yet a special need has arisen where, due to privacy, usability, and/or the
right to be forgotten, information about some specific samples needs to be
removed from a model, called machine unlearning. This emerging technology has
drawn significant interest from both academics and industry due to its
innovation and practicality. At the same time, this ambitious problem has led
to numerous research efforts aimed at confronting its challenges. To the best
of our knowledge, no study has analyzed this complex topic or compared the
feasibility of existing unlearning solutions in different kinds of scenarios.
Accordingly, with this survey, we aim to capture the key concepts of unlearning
techniques. The existing solutions are classified and summarized based on their
characteristics within an up-to-date and comprehensive review of each
category's advantages and limitations. The survey concludes by highlighting
some of the outstanding issues with unlearning techniques, along with some
feasible directions for new research opportunities.