Spatio-Temporal Graph Unlearning

Abstract

Spatio-temporal graphs are widely used in modeling complex dynamic processes such as traffic forecasting, molecular dynamics, and healthcare monitoring. Recently, stringent privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA have introduced significant new challenges for existing spatio-temporal graph models, requiring complete unlearning of unauthorized data. Since each node in a spatio-temporal graph diffuses information globally across both spatial and temporal dimensions, existing unlearning methods primarily designed for static graphs and localized data removal cannot efficiently erase a single node without incurring costs nearly equivalent to full model retraining. Therefore, an effective approach for complete spatio-temporal graph unlearning is a pressing need. To address this, we propose CallosumNet, a divide-and-conquer spatio-temporal graph unlearning framework inspired by the corpus callosum structure that facilitates communication between the brain's two hemispheres. CallosumNet incorporates two novel techniques: (1) Enhanced Subgraph Construction (ESC), which adaptively constructs multiple localized subgraphs based on several factors, including biologically-inspired virtual ganglions; and (2) Global Ganglion Bridging (GGB), which reconstructs global spatio-temporal dependencies from these localized subgraphs, effectively restoring the full graph representation. Empirical results on four diverse real-world datasets show that CallosumNet achieves complete unlearning with only 1%-2% relative MAE loss compared to the gold model, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Ablation studies verify the effectiveness of both proposed techniques.