Group-robust Machine Unlearning
Authors: name: Thomas De Min; name: Subhankar Roy; name: Stéphane Lathuilière; name: Elisa Ricci; name: Massimiliano Mancini
Published: 2025-03-12 12:24:05

Abstract: Machine unlearning is an emerging paradigm to remove the influence of
specific training data (i.e., the forget set) from a model while preserving its
knowledge of the rest of the data (i.e., the retain set). Previous approaches
assume the forget data to be uniformly distributed from all training
datapoints. However, if the data to unlearn is dominant in one group, we
empirically show that performance for this group degrades, leading to fairness
issues. This work tackles the overlooked problem of non-uniformly distributed
forget sets, which we call group-robust machine unlearning, by presenting a
simple, effective strategy that mitigates the performance loss in dominant
groups via sample distribution reweighting. Moreover, we present MIU (Mutual
Information-aware Machine Unlearning), the first approach for group robustness
in approximate machine unlearning. MIU minimizes the mutual information between
model features and group information, achieving unlearning while reducing
performance degradation in the dominant group of the forget set. Additionally,
MIU exploits sample distribution reweighting and mutual information calibration
with the original model to preserve group robustness. We conduct experiments on
three datasets and show that MIU outperforms standard methods, achieving
unlearning without compromising model robustness. Source code available at
https://github.com/tdemin16/group-robust_machine_unlearning.