arXiv:2602.14553cs.LGcs.AI2026-02

提出首个审计机器遗忘合规性的经济框架,解决法律与技术间的执行鸿沟。

Governing AI Forgetting: Auditing for Machine Unlearning Compliance

  • 基于认证遗忘理论构建审计检测能力模型
  • 发现删除请求增多时审计强度可降低,与现实趋势一致
  • 揭露隐性审计反而降低监管效率,适合政策制定者参考

尽管法律要求赋予被遗忘权,但人工智能运营商常无法响应数据删除请求。机器遗忘(MU)虽能从训练模型中移除个人数据影响,但其技术可行性与监管实施之间存在根本差距。本文首次提出基于经济视角的MU合规审计框架,融合认证遗忘理论与监管执行机制。通过假设检验视角刻画MU的验证不确定性,推导审计员的检测能力,并建立审计员与运营商之间的博弈模型。关键挑战源于模型效用与检测概率中的非线性特性,导致传统审计框架难以应对且无解析解。本文将复杂的双变量非线性不动点问题转化为可解的单变量辅助问题,实现系统解耦,证明均衡存在性、唯一性及结构性质。反直觉发现:随着删除请求增加,审计员最优降低检查强度,因运营商遗忘能力减弱使不合规更易察觉,该结论与中国近期审计强度下降趋势一致。此外,证明隐性审计虽提供信息优势,却反而降低监管成本效益,相较公开审计更不高效。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Despite legal mandates for the right to be forgotten, AI operators routinely fail to comply with data deletion requests. While machine unlearning (MU) provides a technical solution to remove personal data's influence from trained models, ensuring compliance remains challenging due to the fundamental gap between MU's technical feasibility and regulatory implementation. In this paper, we introduce the first economic framework for auditing MU compliance, by integrating certified unlearning theory with regulatory enforcement. We first characterize MU's inherent verification uncertainty using a hypothesis-testing interpretation of certified unlearning to derive the auditor's detection capability, and then propose a game-theoretic model to capture the strategic interactions between the auditor and the operator. A key technical challenge arises from MU-specific nonlinearities inherent in the model utility and the detection probability, which create complex strategic couplings that traditional auditing frameworks do not address and that also preclude closed-form solutions. We address this by transforming the complex bivariate nonlinear fixed-point problem into a tractable univariate auxiliary problem, enabling us to decouple the system and establish the equilibrium existence, uniqueness, and structural properties without relying on explicit solutions. Counterintuitively, our analysis reveals that the auditor can optimally reduce the inspection intensity as deletion requests increase, since the operator's weakened unlearning makes non-compliance easier to detect. This is consistent with recent auditing reductions in China despite growing deletion requests. Moreover, we prove that although undisclosed auditing offers informational advantages for the auditor, it paradoxically reduces the regulatory cost-effectiveness relative to disclosed auditing.

机器遗忘合规审计监管科技博弈模型

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