Signal-Guided Optimization for Machine Unlearning
arXiv:2607.11975
The paper introduces GSUO, a guidance-signal-aware optimization framework that uses fine-grained task-specific signals to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of machine unlearning for both random-subset and class-wise forgetting tasks.
Abstract
Current machine unlearning methods predominantly rely on global, coarse-grained intervention strategies. They lack precise pilot signals to guide the unlearning process and fail to provide differentiable guidance across different unlearning tasks. Due to the varying memorization strengths of samples during original training, such a uniform strategy leads to two problems: some samples are over-unlearned, which harms model utility; while others are under-unlearned, leaving residual information that can be exploited by privacy attacks. In this paper, we propose GSUO, a guidance-signal-aware unlearning optimization framework that designs task-specific fine-grained guidance signals to steer the unlearning process and is applicable to both random-subset and class-wise forgetting tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GSUO outperforms 14 baselines in terms of both unlearning effectiveness and generalization, while achieving high efficiency and significant speedups, validating its effectiveness for reliable machine unlearning.
19 pages, 6 figures