AI engineering glossary · AI ethics law product
What is machine unlearning?
Machine unlearning: Techniques for removing the influence of specific training data from a trained model without retraining from scratch, motivated by deletion requests and copyright claims. Exact unlearning means retraining without the data; approximate methods are cheaper but harder to verify.
Machine unlearning: an example
After a user asks for their data to be deleted, a team retrains only the affected shard of a sharded ensemble instead of the whole model.
Related terms
More AI ethics law product terms
- Model card
- North Star metric
- OECD AI Principles
- Overreliance on AI
- Partial dependence plot
- Personal data
- Personally identifiable information
- Post-hoc explanation
Where you learn it
Machine unlearning is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.