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Are we making progress in unlearning? Findings from the first NeurIPS unlearning competition

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arxiv 2406.09073 v1 pith:NYK736RV submitted 2024-06-13 cs.LG

Are we making progress in unlearning? Findings from the first NeurIPS unlearning competition

classification cs.LG
keywords evaluationunlearningcompetitionalgorithmsanalyzedifferentfindingsframework
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We present the findings of the first NeurIPS competition on unlearning, which sought to stimulate the development of novel algorithms and initiate discussions on formal and robust evaluation methodologies. The competition was highly successful: nearly 1,200 teams from across the world participated, and a wealth of novel, imaginative solutions with different characteristics were contributed. In this paper, we analyze top solutions and delve into discussions on benchmarking unlearning, which itself is a research problem. The evaluation methodology we developed for the competition measures forgetting quality according to a formal notion of unlearning, while incorporating model utility for a holistic evaluation. We analyze the effectiveness of different instantiations of this evaluation framework vis-a-vis the associated compute cost, and discuss implications for standardizing evaluation. We find that the ranking of leading methods remains stable under several variations of this framework, pointing to avenues for reducing the cost of evaluation. Overall, our findings indicate progress in unlearning, with top-performing competition entries surpassing existing algorithms under our evaluation framework. We analyze trade-offs made by different algorithms and strengths or weaknesses in terms of generalizability to new datasets, paving the way for advancing both benchmarking and algorithm development in this important area.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. Unlearning with Asymmetric Sources: Improved Unlearning-Utility Trade-off with Public Data

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Asymmetric Langevin Unlearning uses public data to suppress unlearning noise costs by O(1/n_pub²), enabling practical mass unlearning with preserved utility under distribution mismatch.

  2. Unlearning with Asymmetric Sources: Improved Unlearning-Utility Trade-off with Public Data

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    ALU uses public data to suppress unlearning cost quadratically while characterizing distribution mismatch effects, enabling mass unlearning with maintained utility.

  3. Is your algorithm unlearning or untraining?

    cs.LG 2026-04 conditional novelty 7.0

    Machine unlearning conflates reversing the influence of specific training examples (untraining) with removing the full underlying distribution or behavior (unlearning).

  4. Representation-Guided Parameter-Efficient LLM Unlearning

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    REGLU guides LoRA-based unlearning via representation subspaces and orthogonal regularization to outperform prior methods on forget-retain trade-off in LLM benchmarks.

  5. Multimodal Unlearning Across Vision, Language, Video, and Audio: Survey of Methods, Datasets, and Benchmarks

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    A system-first taxonomy and literature synthesis of multimodal unlearning across vision, language, video, and audio, with datasets, benchmarks, metrics, applications, and open challenges.

  6. How to sketch a learning algorithm

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A sketching method based on higher-order derivatives enables efficient data deletion predictions for deep learning models under a stability assumption with near-linear overhead in error and failure parameters.