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Main Authors: Suriyakumar, Vinith M., Alur, Rohan, Sekhari, Ayush, Raghavan, Manish, Wilson, Ashia C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08074
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author Suriyakumar, Vinith M.
Alur, Rohan
Sekhari, Ayush
Raghavan, Manish
Wilson, Ashia C.
author_facet Suriyakumar, Vinith M.
Alur, Rohan
Sekhari, Ayush
Raghavan, Manish
Wilson, Ashia C.
contents Text-to-image diffusion models rely on massive, web-scale datasets. Training them from scratch is computationally expensive, and as a result, developers often prefer to make incremental updates to existing models. These updates often compose fine-tuning steps (to learn new concepts or improve model performance) with "unlearning" steps (to "forget" existing concepts, such as copyrighted works or explicit content). In this work, we demonstrate a critical and previously unknown vulnerability that arises in this paradigm: even under benign, non-adversarial conditions, fine-tuning a text-to-image diffusion model on seemingly unrelated images can cause it to "relearn" concepts that were previously "unlearned." We comprehensively investigate the causes and scope of this phenomenon, which we term concept resurgence, by performing a series of experiments which compose "concept unlearning" with subsequent fine-tuning of Stable Diffusion v1.4 and Stable Diffusion v2.1. Our findings underscore the fragility of composing incremental model updates, and raise serious new concerns about current approaches to ensuring the safety and alignment of text-to-image diffusion models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_08074
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unstable Unlearning: The Hidden Risk of Concept Resurgence in Diffusion Models
Suriyakumar, Vinith M.
Alur, Rohan
Sekhari, Ayush
Raghavan, Manish
Wilson, Ashia C.
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Text-to-image diffusion models rely on massive, web-scale datasets. Training them from scratch is computationally expensive, and as a result, developers often prefer to make incremental updates to existing models. These updates often compose fine-tuning steps (to learn new concepts or improve model performance) with "unlearning" steps (to "forget" existing concepts, such as copyrighted works or explicit content). In this work, we demonstrate a critical and previously unknown vulnerability that arises in this paradigm: even under benign, non-adversarial conditions, fine-tuning a text-to-image diffusion model on seemingly unrelated images can cause it to "relearn" concepts that were previously "unlearned." We comprehensively investigate the causes and scope of this phenomenon, which we term concept resurgence, by performing a series of experiments which compose "concept unlearning" with subsequent fine-tuning of Stable Diffusion v1.4 and Stable Diffusion v2.1. Our findings underscore the fragility of composing incremental model updates, and raise serious new concerns about current approaches to ensuring the safety and alignment of text-to-image diffusion models.
title Unstable Unlearning: The Hidden Risk of Concept Resurgence in Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08074