Unlearning through Knowledge Overwriting: Reversible Federated Unlearning via Selective Sparse Adapter

Zhengyi Zhong, Weidong Bao, Ji Wang, Shuai Zhang, Jingxuan Zhou, Lingjuan Lyu, Wei Yang Bryan Lim; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 30661-30670

Federated Learning is a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative model training. In practice, it is essential not only to continuously train the model to acquire new knowledge but also to guarantee old knowledge the right to be forgotten (i.e., federated unlearning), especially for privacy-sensitive information or harmful knowledge. However, current federated unlearning methods face several challenges, including indiscriminate unlearning of cross-client knowledge, irreversibility of unlearning, and significant unlearning costs. To this end, we propose a method named FUSED, which first identifies critical layers by analyzing each layer's sensitivity to knowledge and constructs sparse unlearning adapters for sensitive ones. Then, the adapters are trained without altering the original parameters, overwriting the unlearning knowledge with the remaining knowledge. This knowledge overwriting process enables FUSED to mitigate the effects of indiscriminate unlearning. Moreover, the introduction of independent adapters makes unlearning reversible and significantly reduces the unlearning costs. Finally, extensive experiments on five datasets across three unlearning scenarios demonstrate that FUSED's effectiveness is comparable to Retraining, surpassing all other baselines while greatly reducing unlearning costs.