Influence-Disentangled Federated Training: Learning Models That Are Easy to Unlearn

Abstract

Federated learning increasingly faces deletion requests that require client-level unlearning without sacrificing model quality, yet a client’s influence is often deeply entangled after many rounds of aggregation. We aim to make unlearning fast, stable, and predictable by reducing the gap to leave-one-out retraining under realistic heterogeneity. We propose Influence-Disentangled Federated Training (IDFT), which instruments standard FedAvg with training-time influence logging: each round’s updates are decomposed into shared covarying directions and a client-separable residual trace, and an entanglement-aware shrinkage suppresses non-removable components. Deletion then becomes a single subtraction followed by a short anchored repair, yielding a stability-style characterization of retrain fidelity driven by the unremoved residual. Across representative benchmarks, IDFT consistently attains the lowest retrain gap (Avg.\ Gap) on multiple dataset--architecture pairs and improves the fidelity--cost frontier, matching retrain-level forgetting with substantially lower communication/compute than history-heavy baselines. These results suggest a practical pathway to unlearning-friendly federated systems by designing for removability during training rather than relying solely on post-hoc corrections.