Forgetting Outside the Box: Scrubbing Deep Networks of Information Accessible from Input-Output Observations

Aditya Golatkar, Alessandro Achille, Stefano Soatto ;

We describe a procedure for removing dependency on a cohort of training data from a trained deep network that improves upon and generalizes previous methods to different readout functions, and can be extended to ensure forgetting in the final activations of the network. We introduce a new bound on how much information can be extracted per query about the forgotten cohort from a black-box network for which only the input-output behavior is observed. The proposed forgetting procedure has a deterministic part derived from the differential equations of a linearized version of the model, and a stochastic part that ensures information destruction by adding noise tailored to the geometry of the loss landscape. We exploit the connections between the final activations and weight dynamics of a DNN inspired by Neural Tangent Kernels to compute the information in the final activations."