Machine Unlearning for Image Retrieval: A Generative Scrubbing Approach

Data owners have the right to request for deleting their data from a machine learning (ML) model. In response, a naïve way is to retrain the model with the original dataset excluding the data to forget, which is however unrealistic as the required dataset may no longer be available and the retraining process is usually computationally expensive. To cope with this reality, machine unlearning has recently attained much attention, which aims to enable data removal from a trained ML model responding to deletion requests, without retraining the model from scratch or full access to the original training dataset. Existing unlearning methods mainly focus on handling conventional ML methods, while unlearning deep neural networks (DNNs) based models remains underexplored, especially for the ones trained on large-scale datasets.