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Paper · 2601.22359 · 2026

The Unseen Threat: Residual Knowledge in Machine Unlearning under Perturbed Samples

Hsiang Hsu, Chun-Fu Chen, Ivan Brugere, Freddy Lecue, Pradeep Niroula, Zichang He

arXiv · PDF · Open in the Atlas

Code that ran

We lifted 11 functions out of this paper's own repositories and ran 1 of them in a sandbox. "Ran" means the function executed on a synthesized input and returned a value. It is not a reproduction of the paper's results.

RepositoryRoleRan
Graph-COM/Langevin_unlearning canonical 1 of 5
joeljang/knowledge-unlearning canonical 0 of 2
AdityaGolatkar/SelectiveForgetting — 0 of 4
FunctionStatusWhere it lives
unadjusted_langevin_algorithm Ran Graph-COM/Langevin_unlearning/langevin.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("d14dd84200ac6432")
_add_logvar Not yet run AdityaGolatkar/SelectiveForgetting/variational.py
pointer only (licence: NOASSERTION) · get_code("23ab3aca3edc9e96")
_reset_logvar Not yet run AdityaGolatkar/SelectiveForgetting/variational.py
pointer only (licence: NOASSERTION) · get_code("e37896de279105a1")
load_features Not yet run Graph-COM/Langevin_unlearning/utils.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("b149132fab16d2fd")
make_variational Not yet run AdityaGolatkar/SelectiveForgetting/variational.py
pointer only (licence: NOASSERTION) · get_code("cde9bb694fbfc040")
normalize_reply Not yet run joeljang/knowledge-unlearning/utils.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("6e5d38d011c3c8dc")
onehot Not yet run Graph-COM/Langevin_unlearning/utils.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("424a51b62f7dd524")
transform_array Not yet run Graph-COM/Langevin_unlearning/utils.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("46155c29dca22749")
unadjusted_langevin_algorithm_multiclass Not yet run Graph-COM/Langevin_unlearning/langevin.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("0ba8166fbd1eea1c")
uppercase Not yet run joeljang/knowledge-unlearning/utils.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("b3ed4c3bccc10c65")
variational_forward Not yet run AdityaGolatkar/SelectiveForgetting/variational.py
pointer only (licence: NOASSERTION) · get_code("e16667b5fa8b0848")

Repositories linked to this paper

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Abstract

Machine unlearning offers a practical alternative to avoid full model re-training by approximately removing the influence of specific user data. While existing methods certify unlearning via statistical indistinguishability from re-trained models, these guarantees do not naturally extend to model outputs when inputs are adversarially perturbed. In particular, slight perturbations of forget samples may still be correctly recognized by the unlearned model-even when a re-trained model fails to do so-revealing a novel privacy risk: information about the forget samples may persist in their local neighborhood. In this work, we formalize this vulnerability as residual knowledge and show that it is inevitable in high-dimensional settings. To mitigate this risk, we propose a fine-tuning strategy, named RURK, that penalizes the model's ability to re-recognize perturbed forget samples. Experiments on vision benchmarks with deep neural networks demonstrate that residual knowledge is prevalent across existing unlearning methods and that our approach effectively prevents residual knowledge.

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