LoTUS: Large-Scale Machine Unlearning with a Taste of Uncertainty
Christoforos N. Spartalis, Theodoros Semertzidis, Efstratios Gavves, Petros Daras
Abstract
We present LoTUS, a novel Machine Unlearning (MU) method that eliminates the influence of training samples from pre-trained models, avoiding retraining from scratch. LoTUS smooths the prediction probabilities of the model up to an information-theoretic bound, mitigating its over-confidence stemming from data memorization. We evaluate LoTUS on Transformer and ResNet18 models against eight baselines across five public datasets. Beyond established MU benchmarks, we evaluate unlearning on ImageNet1k, a large-scale dataset, where retraining is impractical, simulating real-world conditions. Moreover, we introduce the novel Retrain-Free Jensen-Shannon Divergence (RF-JSD) metric to enable evaluation under real-world conditions. The experimental results show that LoTUS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Code: https://github.com/cspartalis/LoTUS
BibTeX
@InProceedings{Spartalis_2025_CVPR,
author = {Spartalis, Christoforos N. and Semertzidis, Theodoros and Gavves, Efstratios and Daras, Petros},
title = {LoTUS: Large-Scale Machine Unlearning with a Taste of Uncertainty},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2025},
pages = {10046-10055}
}