arXiv:2512.13317cs.CVcs.AI2025-12

让特定人脸无法被检索,同时保持系统整体识别能力。

Face Identity Unlearning for Retrieval via Embedding Dispersion

  • 通过分散嵌入向量位置实现身份遗忘。
  • 在VGGFace2和CelebA上遗忘效果更优,且不影响其他身份检索性能。
  • 适合需要保护隐私的现代人脸识别系统使用。

人脸识别系统依赖于学习高度可区分且紧凑的身份簇以实现精准检索。然而,与其它监控技术类似,此类系统因存在未经授权的身份追踪风险而引发严重隐私担忧。尽管已有研究探索机器遗忘作为隐私保护手段,但其在现代基于嵌入的人脸检索模型中的适用性仍鲜有研究。本文研究了面向检索系统的身份遗忘问题,并揭示其内在挑战:目标是通过将特定身份的嵌入向量在超球面上分散,阻止其形成紧凑的身份簇,从而使其无法被重新识别。主要难点在于实现遗忘效果的同时,维持嵌入空间的判别结构及剩余身份的检索性能。我们评估了多种现有近似类别遗忘方法(如随机标签、梯度上升、边界遗忘及其他近期方法),并提出一种简单有效的基于分散的遗忘方案。在标准基准数据集VGGFace2和CelebA上的大量实验表明,该方法在保持检索实用性的同时,实现了更优的遗忘表现。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Face recognition systems rely on learning highly discriminative and compact identity clusters to enable accurate retrieval. However, as with other surveillance-oriented technologies, such systems raise serious privacy concerns due to their potential for unauthorized identity tracking. While several works have explored machine unlearning as a means of privacy protection, their applicability to face retrieval - especially for modern embedding-based recognition models - remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study the problem of face identity unlearning for retrieval systems and present its inherent challenges. The goal is to make selected identities unretrievable by dispersing their embeddings on the hypersphere and preventing the formation of compact identity clusters that enable re-identification in the gallery. The primary challenge is to achieve this forgetting effect while preserving the discriminative structure of the embedding space and the retrieval performance of the model for the remaining identities. To address this, we evaluate several existing approximate class unlearning methods (e.g., Random Labeling, Gradient Ascent, Boundary Unlearning, and other recent approaches) in the context of face retrieval and propose a simple yet effective dispersion-based unlearning approach. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks (VGGFace2, CelebA) demonstrate that our method achieves superior forgetting behavior while preserving retrieval utility.

人脸识别隐私保护嵌入分散遗忘学习

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