DISCERN: Distributional Synthetic Replay for Retain-Free Incremental Machine Unlearning

Abstract

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data from a trained model without retraining from scratch. In real deployments, however, deletion requests arrive over time, calling for incremental class unlearning (ICU): classes are removed sequentially, previously forgotten knowledge must remain forgotten, and the remaining classes must be preserved. We present DIstributional SynthetiC rEplay for Retain-free iNcremental unlearning (DISCERN), an intervention-based class unlearning method that replaces access to the retain set with synthetic embeddings sampled from per-class parametric distributions. Unlike prototype-based replay, which assumes an isotropic Gaussian around each class centroid, DISCERN fits Euclidean (Gaussian, Laplace, Student's $t$) and directional (von Mises--Fisher, Fisher--Bingham) families to each class and selects among them through statistical tests and, when none of them accepts, cross-validated log-likelihood. This design is motivated by the architecture-dependent latent geometry: transformer embeddings lie approximately on a hypersphere and concentrate around class directions, unlike those of convolutional networks. We evaluate DISCERN against seven retain-free baselines on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 with two convolutional and two transformer backbones, under single-class, multi-class, and incremental unlearning. DISCERN is competitive when classes are removed at once and is the most stable method in ICU on transformers: on ViT-B/16, after 20 sequential deletions it retains a harmonic mean of $0.797$, whereas the strongest method in the simultaneous setting drops from $0.918$ to $0.048$. A paired ablation shows that per-class distribution selection substantially reduces the resurfacing of previously forgotten classes, acting as a stabilizer of accumulated forgetting rather than a uniform improvement.