提出新方法检测模型是否真删数据,发现多数方法只抑制信息而非彻底删除。
Suppression or Deletion: A Restoration-Based Representation-Level Analysis of Machine Unlearning
- 用稀疏自编码器识别中间层特征,通过推理时引导区分信息抑制与删除
- 12种主流方法中多数恢复率超80%,说明关键特征仍保留在模型中
- 适用于关注隐私安全的AI应用,尤其需验证模型真正遗忘数据的场景
随着预训练模型在互联网广泛共享,确保其能按请求遗忘敏感、版权或私密信息变得至关重要。机器遗忘被提出以应对这一挑战,但现有评估依赖输出层面指标,无法验证信息是否在表示层面被彻底删除,仅抑制不足以实现真正遗忘。为此,我们提出一种基于重建的分析框架,利用稀疏自编码器识别中间层中的类别特异性专家特征,并通过推理时控制进行定量区分。对图像分类任务中12种主要遗忘方法的应用显示,多数方法的未学习信息恢复率超过80%,表明它们仅在决策边界处抑制信息,而保留了中间表示中的语义特征。值得注意的是,即使从预训练检查点重新训练,恢复率依然很高,揭示了预训练继承的鲁棒语义特征并未被移除。这些结果表明,表示层面的信息留存带来显著风险,现有输出指标未能察觉。我们提出新的评估准则,强调表示层面验证,尤其适用于预训练模型时代的关键隐私应用场景。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As pretrained models are increasingly shared on the web, ensuring that models can forget or delete sensitive, copyrighted, or private information upon request has become crucial. Machine unlearning has been proposed to address this challenge. However, current evaluations for unlearning methods rely on output-based metrics, which cannot verify whether information is completely deleted or merely suppressed at the representation level, where suppression is insufficient for true unlearning. To address this gap, we propose a novel restoration-based analysis framework that uses Sparse Autoencoders to identify class-specific expert features in intermediate layers and applies inference-time steering to quantitatively distinguish between suppression and deletion. Applying our framework to 12 major unlearning methods in image classification tasks, we find that most methods achieve high restoration rates of unlearned information, indicating that they only suppress information at the decision-boundary level, while preserving semantic features in intermediate representations. Notably, even retraining from pretrained checkpoints shows high restoration, revealing that robust semantic features inherited from pretraining are not removed by retraining. These results demonstrate that representation-level retention poses significant risks overlooked by output-based metrics, highlighting the need for new unlearning evaluation criteria. We propose new evaluation guidelines that prioritize representation-level verification, especially for privacy-critical applications in the era of pre-trained models.
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