A Unified PAC-Bayesian Framework for Machine Unlearning via Information Risk Minimization

Machine unlearning refers to mechanisms that can remove the influence of a subset of training data upon request from a trained model without incurring the cost of re-training from scratch. This paper develops a unified PAC-Bayesian framework for machine unlearning that recovers the two recent design principles - variational unlearning [1] and forgetting Lagrangian [2] as information risk minimization problems [3]. Accordingly, both criteria can be interpreted as PAC-Bayesian upper bounds on the test loss of the unlearned model that take the form of free energy metrics.