Computer Science ›› 2026, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (3): 64-77.doi: 10.11896/jsjkx.250700094

• Intelligent Information System Based on AGI Technology • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Node-influence Based Construction Algorithm of Approximate Worst-case Forgetting Set for Graph Unlearning

ZHAO Zhengbiao1, LU Hanyu1,2, DING Hongfa3,4   

  1. 1 College of Big Data and Information Engineering, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China
    2 School of Information Engineering, Guizhou University of Engineering Science, Bijie, Guizhou 551700, China
    3 School of Information, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Guiyang 550025, China
    4 Guizhou Province Key Laboratory of Sovereign Blockchain, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Guiyang 550025, China
  • Received:2025-07-15 Revised:2025-10-29 Published:2026-03-12
  • About author:ZHAO Zhengbiao,born in 1998,master,is a member of CCF(No.Y6301G).His main research interests include data security and privacy protection.
    DING Hongfa,born in 1988,Ph.D,associate professor,is a member of CCF(No.36866M).His main research interests include data security and privacy protection,cryptographic algorithm and protocol design.
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China(62566006),Science and Technology Program of Guizhou(Qian Sci. Contr. Achiev. [2024]Major-17,Qian-Sci. Sontr. Platform ZSYS[2024]003, QKH-Basic-ZK[2022]General018),Natural Science Researching Program of D.o.E. of Guizhou (Qian Edu. & Tech. [2024] 326,Qian Edu. & Tech. [2023] 065,Qian Edu. & Tech. [2023]014),“Golden Course” of Ordinary Undergraduate Universities in Guizhou Province(2024JKXN0078) and Artificial Intelligence Application Innovation Talent Team Project of Bijie City((2023)09).

Abstract: GNNs have attracted significant attention due to their wide-ranging applications in fields such as social networks and recommendation systems.Motivated by intensified demands for data removal,including the right to be forgotten,data-ownership safeguards,and the expiration of data-use permissions,research on unlearning has accelerated,particularly in graph unlearning,deep unlearning,and unlearning in large language models.However,most existing studies simulate forgetting by randomly removing data,which fails to provide the strongest guarantee for data owners’ right to be forgotten and neglects the construction of extreme scenarios required to comprehensively evaluate different unlearning algorithms.To address these issues,this paper proposes a worst-case forgetting set construction algorithm based on node influence in graph data,aiming to approximately construct an optimal set of nodes to be forgotten for graph unlearning.This algorithm ranks the influence of training sample nodes by combining each node’s training loss and structural centrality,thereby identifying the most influential and hardest-to-forget nodes.It then selects the forgetting set by jointly considering each node’s impact on model performance and its importance.Experiments on different GNN models,graph datasets,and unlearning algorithms show that the proposed algorithm enables graph unlearning methods to more effectively reduce model performance.And it achieves up to a 15% greater reduction in performance compared to random forgetting strategies.At the same time,the approach significantly accentuates performance differences among various graph unlearning algorithms across multiple metrics,facilitating more effective multi-dimensional evaluation of these unlearning algorithms.

Key words: Graph neural network, Machine unlearning, Privacy protection, Worst-case forget set, Node influence

CLC Number: 

  • TP309.2
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