Gradient Transformation: Towards Efficient and Model-Agnostic Unlearning for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks

Graph unlearning has emerged as an essential tool for safeguarding user privacy and mitigating the negative impacts of undesirable data. Meanwhile, the advent of dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) marks a significant advancement due to their superior capability in learning from dynamic graphs, which encapsulate spatial-temporal variations in diverse real-world applications (e.g., traffic forecasting). With the increasing prevalence of DGNNs, it becomes imperative to investigate the implementation of dynamic graph unlearning. However, current graph unlearning methodologies are designed for GNNs operating on static graphs and exhibit limitations including their serving in a pre-processing manner and impractical resource demands. Furthermore, the adaptation of these methods to DGNNs presents non-trivial challenges, owing to the distinctive nature of dynamic graphs. To this end, we propose an effective, efficient, model-agnostic, and post-processing method to implement DGNN unlearning. Specifically, we first define the unlearning requests and formulate dynamic graph unlearning in the context of continuous-time dynamic graphs. After conducting a role analysis on the unlearning data, the remaining data, and the target DGNN model, we propose a method called Gradient Transformation and a loss function to map the unlearning request to the desired parameter update. Evaluations on six real-world datasets and state-of-the-art DGNN backbones demonstrate its effectiveness (e.g., limited performance drop even obvious improvement) and efficiency (e.g., at most 7.23× speed-up) outperformance, and potential advantages in handling future unlearning requests (e.g., at most 32.59× speed-up).