With growing emphasis on privacy regulations, machine unlearning has become increasingly critical in real-world applications such as social networks and recommender systems, many of which are naturally represented as graphs. However, existing graph unlearning methods often modify nodes or edges indiscriminately, overlooking their impact on fairness. For instance, forgetting links between users of different genders may inadvertently exacerbate group disparities. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that jointly optimizes both the graph structure and the model to achieve fair unlearning. Our method rewires the graph by removing redundant edges that hinder forgetting while preserving fairness through targeted edge augmentation. We further introduce a worst-case evaluation mechanism to assess robustness under challenging scenarios. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our approach achieves more effective and fair unlearning than existing baselines.

FROG: Fair Removal on Graph / Chen, Ziheng; Cheng, Jiali; Amiri, Hadi; Nag, Kaushiki; Lin, Lu; Liu, Sijia; Tolomei, Gabriele; Sun, Xiangguo. - (2025), pp. 415-424. ( ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management Seoul, Republic of Korea ) [10.1145/3746252.3761341].

FROG: Fair Removal on Graph

Tolomei, Gabriele;
2025

Abstract

With growing emphasis on privacy regulations, machine unlearning has become increasingly critical in real-world applications such as social networks and recommender systems, many of which are naturally represented as graphs. However, existing graph unlearning methods often modify nodes or edges indiscriminately, overlooking their impact on fairness. For instance, forgetting links between users of different genders may inadvertently exacerbate group disparities. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that jointly optimizes both the graph structure and the model to achieve fair unlearning. Our method rewires the graph by removing redundant edges that hinder forgetting while preserving fairness through targeted edge augmentation. We further introduce a worst-case evaluation mechanism to assess robustness under challenging scenarios. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our approach achieves more effective and fair unlearning than existing baselines.
2025
ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
machine unlearning; graph neural networks, fairness
04 Pubblicazione in atti di convegno::04b Atto di convegno in volume
FROG: Fair Removal on Graph / Chen, Ziheng; Cheng, Jiali; Amiri, Hadi; Nag, Kaushiki; Lin, Lu; Liu, Sijia; Tolomei, Gabriele; Sun, Xiangguo. - (2025), pp. 415-424. ( ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management Seoul, Republic of Korea ) [10.1145/3746252.3761341].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11573/1756261
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