Certifying the Right to Be Forgotten: Primal-Dual Optimization for Sample and Label Unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning

Federated unlearning has become an attractive approach to address privacy concerns in collaborative machine learning, for situations when sensitive data is remembered by AI models during the machine learning process. It enables the removal of specific data influences from trained models, aligning with the growing emphasis on the "right to be forgotten." While extensively studied in horizontal federated learning, unlearning in vertical federated learning (VFL) remains challenging due to the distributed feature architecture. VFL unlearning includes sample unlearning that removes specific data points' influence and label unlearning that removes entire classes. Since different parties hold complementary features of the same samples, unlearning tasks require cross-party coordination, creating computational overhead and complexities from feature interdependencies. To address such challenges, we propose FedORA (Federated Optimization for data Removal via primal-dual Algorithm), designed for sample and label unlearning in VFL. FedORA formulates the removal of certain samples or labels as a constrained optimization problem solved using a primal-dual framework. Our approach introduces a new unlearning loss function that promotes classification uncertainty rather than misclassification. An adaptive step size enhances stability, while an asymmetric batch design, considering the prior influence of the remaining data on the model, handles unlearning and retained data differently to efficiently reduce computational costs. We provide theoretical analysis proving that the model difference between FedORA and Train-from-scratch is bounded, establishing guarantees for unlearning effectiveness. Experiments on tabular and image datasets demonstrate that FedORA achieves unlearning effectiveness and utility preservation comparable to Train-from-scratch with reduced computation and communication overhead.