FednP: Federated Unlearning With Multiple Client Set Partitions

Federated learning (FL) has garnered increased attention in the field of distributed machine learning and privacy computing. In the FL setup, effective and efficient unlearning algorithms are required to remove the impact of specific training data from the trained model, called federated unlearning. However, traditional machine unlearning algorithms face limitations in FL systems because the client data is private and even non-IID. In this paper, we propose a new federated unlearning algorithm called FednP. Our approach involves dividing the client set into subsets using multiple different partitions. We then train constituent models for each client subset within these partitions using existing FL algorithms and aggregate the results of constituent models for predictions. With multiple partitions, FednP limits the influence of the data to be erased within its belonging subsets, while it also improves the accuracy of the aggregated prediction. Based on the multiple-partition framework, we design partition creation methods to effectively enhance the prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we propose a cost reduction method to reduce the cost of training/retraining. Our extensive experiments on various datasets and model architectures demonstrate that FednP improves prediction accuracy while well-controls the additional cost.

Duke Scholars

Author Bing Luo DKU Faculty