Exact Unlearning via Quantized Sufficient Statistics
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.
Sources
- Targeted Unlearning with Single Layer Unlearning Gradient
- MU-Bench: A Multitask Multimodal Benchmark for Machine Unlearning
- Towards Efficient and Exact Forgetting Services in Pre-Trained-Model-based Continual Learning
- Provable Unlearning with Gradient Ascent on Two-Layer ReLU Neural Networks
- QUAIL: Quantization Aware Unlearning for Mitigating Misinformation in LLMs
- Fast Exact Unlearning for In-Context Learning Data for LLMs
- Exact Federated Continual Unlearning for Ridge Heads on Frozen Foundation Models
- LLM Unlearning via Neural Activation Redirection
- Forget by Uncertainty: Orthogonal Entropy Unlearning for Quantized Neural Networks
Related papers
- Polynomial-Augmented Neural Networks (PANNs) with Weak Orthogonality Constraints for Enhanced Function and PDE Approximation
- AIRL-S: Unifying Reinforcement Learning and Search-Based Test-Time Scaling via Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning
- Transformers as Bayesian In-Context Experimenters: Smoothness-Adaptive Efficient ATE Estimation
- Convergence issues in Relational Concept Analysis based on AOC-posets
- Beliefs Beyond Posteriors: The Predictive Cost of ELBO Binding
- Understanding Diffusion Models via Ratio-Based Function Approximation with SignReLU Networks