Machine unlearning is a method to make machine learning models forget specific information without complete retraining, crucial for privacy protection, data accuracy, and ethical AI.
It is a response to privacy legislation like GDPR, enabling erasure of personal data upon demand and rectifying old, inaccurate, or biased facts in models.
Various methods like retraining from scratch, influence functions, fine-tuning, and model editing help achieve machine unlearning, facing challenges in verification, performance degradation, scalability, and defining forgetting.
Real-world applications include healthcare, finance, social media, and autonomous systems, with future directions focusing on integration with differential privacy, standardized benchmarks, efficient algorithms, and legal frameworks.