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Measuring Forgetting of Memorized Training Examples

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arxiv 2207.00099 v2 pith:MFU74WRK submitted 2022-06-30 cs.LG

Measuring Forgetting of Memorized Training Examples

classification cs.LG
keywords examplesmodelstrainingforgetforgettingprivacyseenattacks
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Machine learning models exhibit two seemingly contradictory phenomena: training data memorization, and various forms of forgetting. In memorization, models overfit specific training examples and become susceptible to privacy attacks. In forgetting, examples which appeared early in training are forgotten by the end. In this work, we connect these phenomena. We propose a technique to measure to what extent models "forget" the specifics of training examples, becoming less susceptible to privacy attacks on examples they have not seen recently. We show that, while non-convex models can memorize data forever in the worst-case, standard image, speech, and language models empirically do forget examples over time. We identify nondeterminism as a potential explanation, showing that deterministically trained models do not forget. Our results suggest that examples seen early when training with extremely large datasets - for instance those examples used to pre-train a model - may observe privacy benefits at the expense of examples seen later.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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