Do Influence-Derived Data Perturbations Enable Machine Unlearning? A Controlled Study of Three Plausible Roles

Abstract

We evaluate Deep Perturbation Learning (DPL), which perturbs training images and labels along influence-derived directions, in three roles in which prior work has positioned it for machine unlearning: a direct deletion signal (the strongest claim), a utility-preserving regularizer, and a warm start for adversarial unlearning. Evidence for the weaker roles has been used to support the stronger one, so we test each role separately under a matched protocol with exact-seed retraining baselines. An audit of the public implementation identifies two correctness issues: image directions are computed on augmented, normalized tensors but applied to raw images, and the label perturbation falls below float32 resolution, leaving labels unchanged. After correcting the image-perturbation pipeline, DPL fails the direct-deletion criterion on CIFAR-10/ResNet-18 in all three paired seeds. Its utility effects are inconsistent in sign across seeds, and once direction-computation time is counted it underperforms simple warm-start baselines. A one-seed Tiny ImageNet check likewise does not favor DPL as a regularizer or warm start; preprocessing inconsistencies in the released code make the direct comparison there inconclusive. These results cover random instance deletion only and do not rule out influence-based methods in other deletion regimes. We release a role-matched evaluation protocol and an audit checklist for perturbation-based deletion claims.