An Information Theoretic Approach to Machine Unlearning

To comply with AI and data regulations, the need to forget private or copyrighted information from trained machine learning models is increasingly important. The key challenge in unlearning is forgetting the necessary data in a timely manner, while preserving model performance. In this work, we address the zero-shot unlearning scenario, whereby an unlearning algorithm must be able to remove data given only a trained model and the data to be forgotten. We explore unlearning from an information theoretic perspective, connecting the influence of a sample to the information gain a model receives by observing it. From this, we derive a simple but principled zero-shot unlearning method based on the geometry of the model. Our approach takes the form of minimising the gradient of a learned function with respect to a small neighbourhood around a target forget point. This induces a smoothing effect, causing forgetting by moving the boundary of the classifier. We explore the intuition behind why this approach can jointly unlearn forget samples while preserving general model performance through a series of low-dimensional experiments. We perform extensive empirical evaluation of our method over a range of contemporary benchmarks, verifying that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art performance under the strict constraints of zero-shot unlearning. Code for the project can be found at https://github.com/jwf40/Information-Theoretic-Unlearning