Exact Unlearning via Quantized Sufficient Statistics

arXiv:2610.07197 · cs.LG · Submitted 2026-10-05 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-10-05

Updated: 2026-10-05

Comments: 33 pages, 20 figures, 15 tables. Accepted at NeurIPS 2026

Code: https://github.com/atavory/rqu

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Exact unlearning requires a deployed predictor to match one rebuilt without the information named by a deletion request.

Abstract

Exact unlearning requires a deployed predictor to match one rebuilt without the information named by a deletion request. Existing general-purpose exact methods localize retraining through disjoint shards, but every request still invalidates a model, and smaller shards reduce the data available to each constituent predictor. We introduce Quantized Sufficient Statistics (QSS), which separates a small frozen schema from mutable, sum-decomposable content. The schema learns global structure; the content stores local prediction corrections as additive statistics indexed by quantized regions. Deleting content is therefore exact subtraction rather than optimization. We distinguish two guarantees: QSS-L exactly removes a label while retaining the unlabelled input, whereas QSS-E exactly removes both input and label by learning the schema without deletable examples. A deletion takes the arithmetic fast path with probability 1-ρ and triggers a full rebuild with probability ρ; all reported expected latencies include both events. Across 15 vision, text, and tabular datasets at ρ=0.5%, QSS-L is within 2 percentage points of SISA on 11 tasks and provides 4--483 times lower expected deletion latency on the low-class-count tasks where a compact schema is effective. QSS-E quantifies the additional accuracy cost of removing every trace of an input.

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