ROVER: Robust Generative Continual Identity Unlearning Against Relearning Attacks

Abstract

Recent generative unlearning models synthesize high quality samples while protecting private information by unlearning the identity. However, existing generative identity unlearning methods face two challenges in multi-identity unlearning: 1) identity conflicts, which cause conflicts of model parameters in the continuous erasure of multiple identities; 2) fragile unlearning, where the model's unlearning ability deteriorates or fails under malicious attacks. In this paper, we introduce a critical yet under-explored task called robust multi-identity unlearning, with the goals of resolving identity conflicts to achieve interference-free unlearning and protecting against malicious attacks to achieve robust unlearning. To satisfy these goals, we propose a novel framework, RObust generatiVE continual identity unlearning against Relearning attacks (ROVER). By filtering unlearning requests with latent similarity, our method effectively isolates benign unlearning from malicious attacks to preserve identity removal integrity. Meanwhile, residual orthogonal resonator resolves identity conflicts in the continuous erasure of multiple identities, preserving stability in benign continual unlearning. Moreover, we introduce the phantom guard network to block malicious attacks by absorbing adversarial gradients, ensuring irreversible identity unlearning. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the task of robust multi-identity unlearning against relearning attacks.