Orthogonal Soft Pruning for Efficient Class Unlearning
On the map: LLM safety and security → Federated unlearning and poisoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Efficient and controllable data unlearning in federated learning remains challenging, due to the trade-off between forgetting and retention performance. Especially under non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) settings, where deep feature entanglement exacerbates this dilemma. To address this challenge, we propose FedOrtho, a federated unlearning framework that combines orthogonalized deep convolutional kernels with an activation-driven controllable one-shot soft pruning (OSP) mechanism. FedOrtho enforces kernel orthogonality and local-global alignment to decouple feature representations and mitigate client drift. This structural independence enables precise one-shot pruning of forgetting-related kernels while preserving retained knowledge. FedOrtho achieves SOTA performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR100 and TinyImageNet with ResNet and VGG frameworks, verifying that FedOrtho supports class-, client-, and sample-level unlearning with over 98% forgetting quality. It reduces computational and communication costs by 2-3 orders of magnitude in federated settings and achieves subsecond-level erasure in centralized scenarios while maintaining over 97% retention accuracy and mitigating membership inference risks.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Federated unlearning and poisoning, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 25 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2025.
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- 2017Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functionscited by 1,741
- 2019Machine Unlearningcited by 1,061
- 2019Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Net: Selective Forgetting in Deep Networkscited by 618
- 2019Certified Data Removal from Machine Learning Modelscited by 535
- 2019Making AI Forget You: Data Deletion in Machine Learningcited by 465
- 2023SalUn: Empowering Machine Unlearning via Gradient-based Weight Saliency in Both Image Classification and Generationcited by 386
- 2022A Survey of Machine Unlearningcited by 312
- 2020Descent-to-Delete: Gradient-Based Methods for Machine Unlearningcited by 311
12 more
- 2020Systematic Evaluation of Privacy Risks of Machine Learning Modelscited by 292
- 2021Fast Yet Effective Machine Unlearningcited by 217
- 2022Can Bad Teaching Induce Forgetting? Unlearning in Deep Networks using an Incompetent Teachercited by 194
- 2016Clipper: A Low-Latency Online Prediction Serving Systemcited by 191
- 2023Fast Machine Unlearning Without Retraining Through Selective Synaptic Dampeningcited by 181
- 2023Boundary Unlearningcited by 134
- 2019Orthogonal Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 123
- 2020Serving DNNs like Clockwork: Performance Predictability from the Bottom Upcited by 120
- 2023Learning to Unlearn: Instance-wise Unlearning for Pre-trained Classifierscited by 67
- 2017All You Need is Beyond a Good Init: Exploring Better Solution for Training Extremely Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with Orthonormality and Modulationcited by 58
- 2019DenseNet Models for Tiny ImageNet Classificationcited by 17
- 2023ERASER: Machine Unlearning in MLaaS via an Inference Serving-Aware Approachcited by 15
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