On the Accuracy of Newton Step and Influence Function Data Attributions

Abstract

Data attribution estimates how a trained model would change if a subset of training points were removed, and is a central primitive for tasks such as interpretability, data valuation, and machine unlearning. Despite its widespread use, our theoretical understanding of key data attribution methods -- Influence Functions (IF) and a single Newton Step (NS) -- remains limited: existing guarantees heavily rely on *global* strong convexity and yield bounds with pessimistic dependence on the parameter dimension $d$ and the number of removed samples $k$. We give a new analysis of IF and NS for convex ERM that replaces global assumptions with *local* conditions: it suffices that the loss is strongly convex and sufficiently smooth only in a neighborhood of the first Newton step. As a concrete validation, we analyze logistic regression with Gaussian features and show that our bounds capture the correct scaling up to polylogarithmic factors, yielding matching upper and lower bounds and explaining observed regimes in which NS is markedly more accurate than IF, thereby resolving open questions raised by (Koh et al., 2019).