GRIN+: Towards Fast Yet Effective Machine Unlearning for Imbalanced Medical Data

Abstract

As deep learning models become fundamental to modern healthcare, the "Right to be Forgotten" mandated by privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA necessitates effective machine unlearning (MU) to remove sensitive patient data from trained models. However, existing MU techniques often struggle with a fundamental "privacy-efficiency-utility" (PEU) trilemma, particularly in medical scenarios where data is frequently characterized by severe class imbalance and long-tailed distributions. In such cases, standard unlearning methods can fail to protect key clinical knowledge or mistakenly delete features essential for diagnosing rare conditions due to the gradient dominance of majority classes. To address these challenges, we propose GRIN+, a novel machine unlearning framework designed for fast and precise data erasure in imbalanced medical scenarios. GRIN+ decouples unlearning-specific knowledge from generalized representations at the parameter level by analyzing the gradient contributions of both "forget" and "retain" sets. It introduces a class-adaptive influence scoring mechanism to rectify gradient dominance and employs a direction-constrained update strategy to prevent the unintended erosion of vital clinical knowledge. Comprehensive benchmarking across multiple medical datasets, including skin cancer (ISIC), brain tumor (MRI), and breast ultrasound (BUSI), demonstrates that GRIN+ achieves an optimal balance of the PEU trilemma. Experimental results show that GRIN+ maintains high diagnostic accuracy and robust privacy while significantly enhancing runtime efficiency compared to existing baselines. We open-source the GRIN+ code and benchmarks to support further research.