Machine Unlearning for Responsible and Adaptive AI in Education

The concept of Machine Unlearning (MU) has gained popularity in various domains due to its ability to address several issues in Machine Learning (ML) models, particularly those related to privacy, security, bias mitigation, and adaptability. With these abilities, MU is evolving into a promising technology in upholding Responsible AI principles and optimizing ML models' performance. However, despite its promising potential, the concept has not received much attention in the education sector. In an attempt to encourage further uptake of this promising technology in the educational landscape, this paper demonstrates that MU indeed has great potential to serve as a practical mechanism for operationalizing Responsible AI principles as well as an essential tool for Adaptive AI within the educational application domain hence fostering trust in AI-driven educational systems. Through a structured review of 42 peer-reviewed sources, we identify four domains where MU holds particular promise namely privacy protection, resilience against adversarial inputs, mitigation of systemic bias, and adaptability in evolving learning contexts. We systematically explore these potentials and their interventions to core challenges in ML-based education systems. As a conceptual contribution, we present a reference Machine Unlearning application architecture for Responsible and Adaptive AI (MU-RAAI) in education context.