Physics-Aware Machine Unlearning for Cyber-Physical Systems

Mohammad Zakaria Haider, Muhammad Nadeem, Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman

This paper proposes a physics-guided gradient-ascent-based machine unlearning method that couples the forgetting signal with the physical residual of the target cyber-physical systems, ensuring that weight updates during unlearning are steered toward physically feasible regions of the weight space. The physics residual acts as a safety fence during gradient ascent: the model is steered away from the poisoned behavioral basin and simultaneously toward physics-compliant territory, rather than toward an arbitrary alternative that may still violate domain constraints. We evaluate the proposed method against four baselines: naive gradient ascent, exact unlearning, SISA, and full retraining on an IEEE 34-bus distribution system, driven by two physics-informed neural network-based distribution energy resource controllers and validated through high-fidelity OpenDSS power-flow co-simulation. From the evaluation, we found that our proposed physics-guided model simultaneously removes poison and restores physical compliance, which are essential for the safe deployment of safety-critical cyber-physical systems