# Privacy-Aware Machine Unlearning with SISA for Reinforcement Learning-Based Ransomware Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16760 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16760/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Machine unlearning, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 4 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Machine unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/safety/machine-unlearning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey of Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02299/) (2022)
- [Threats, Attacks, and Defenses in Machine Unlearning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13682/) (2024)
- [How Secure is Forgetting? Linking Machine Unlearning to Machine Learning Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20257/) (2025)
- [SMS: Self-supervised Model Seeding for Verification of Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25613/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Auditable Machine Unlearning for Privacy-Compliant Ransomware Detection Using Multi-Shard SISA and Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06860/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ransomware detection systems increasingly rely on behavior-based machine learning to address evolving attack strategies. However, emerging privacy compliance, data governance, and responsible AI deployment demand not only accurate detection but also the ability to efficiently remove the influence of specific training samples without retraining the models from scratch. In this study, we present a privacy-aware machine unlearning evaluation framework for reinforcement learning (RL)-based ransomware detection built on Sharded, Isolated, Sliced, and Aggregated (SISA) training. The framework enables efficient data deletion by retraining only the affected model shards rather than the entire detector, reducing the retraining cost while preserving detection performance. We conduct a controlled comparative study using value-based RL agents, including Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN), under identical experimental settings with a cost-sensitive reward design and 5-fold cross-validation on Windows 11 ransomware dataset. Detection confidence is evaluated using a continuous Q-score margin, enabling ROC-AUC analysis beyond binary predictions. For unlearning, the dataset is partitioned into five shards with majority-vote aggregation, and a fast-unlearning path is evaluated by deleting 5% of the samples from a single shard and retraining only that shard. Results show that SISA-based unlearning incurs negligible utility degradation (<= 0.05 percent F1 drop) while substantially reducing retraining time relative to full SISA retraining. DDQN exhibits slightly improved stability and lower utility loss than DQN, while both agents maintain near identical in-distribution performance after unlearning. These findings indicate that SISA provides an efficient unlearning mechanism for RL-based ransomware detection, supporting privacy-aware deployment without compromising security effectiveness.