TRCE: Towards Reliable Malicious Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Ruidong, Guo, Honglin, Wang, Lanjun, Zhang, Chenyu, Nie, Weizhi, Liu, An-An
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Ruidong
Guo, Honglin
Wang, Lanjun
Zhang, Chenyu
Nie, Weizhi
Liu, An-An
author_facet Chen, Ruidong
Guo, Honglin
Wang, Lanjun
Zhang, Chenyu
Nie, Weizhi
Liu, An-An
contents Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models enable photorealistic image generation, but they also risk producing malicious content, such as NSFW images. To mitigate risk, concept erasure methods are studied to facilitate the model to unlearn specific concepts. However, current studies struggle to fully erase malicious concepts implicitly embedded in prompts (e.g., metaphorical expressions or adversarial prompts) while preserving the model's normal generation capability. To address this challenge, our study proposes TRCE, using a two-stage concept erasure strategy to achieve an effective trade-off between reliable erasure and knowledge preservation. Firstly, TRCE starts by erasing the malicious semantics implicitly embedded in textual prompts. By identifying a critical mapping objective(i.e., the [EoT] embedding), we optimize the cross-attention layers to map malicious prompts to contextually similar prompts but with safe concepts. This step prevents the model from being overly influenced by malicious semantics during the denoising process. Following this, considering the deterministic properties of the sampling trajectory of the diffusion model, TRCE further steers the early denoising prediction toward the safe direction and away from the unsafe one through contrastive learning, thus further avoiding the generation of malicious content. Finally, we conduct comprehensive evaluations of TRCE on multiple malicious concept erasure benchmarks, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness in erasing malicious concepts while better preserving the model's original generation ability. The code is available at: http://github.com/ddgoodgood/TRCE. CAUTION: This paper includes model-generated content that may contain offensive material.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_07389
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TRCE: Towards Reliable Malicious Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Chen, Ruidong
Guo, Honglin
Wang, Lanjun
Zhang, Chenyu
Nie, Weizhi
Liu, An-An
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models enable photorealistic image generation, but they also risk producing malicious content, such as NSFW images. To mitigate risk, concept erasure methods are studied to facilitate the model to unlearn specific concepts. However, current studies struggle to fully erase malicious concepts implicitly embedded in prompts (e.g., metaphorical expressions or adversarial prompts) while preserving the model's normal generation capability. To address this challenge, our study proposes TRCE, using a two-stage concept erasure strategy to achieve an effective trade-off between reliable erasure and knowledge preservation. Firstly, TRCE starts by erasing the malicious semantics implicitly embedded in textual prompts. By identifying a critical mapping objective(i.e., the [EoT] embedding), we optimize the cross-attention layers to map malicious prompts to contextually similar prompts but with safe concepts. This step prevents the model from being overly influenced by malicious semantics during the denoising process. Following this, considering the deterministic properties of the sampling trajectory of the diffusion model, TRCE further steers the early denoising prediction toward the safe direction and away from the unsafe one through contrastive learning, thus further avoiding the generation of malicious content. Finally, we conduct comprehensive evaluations of TRCE on multiple malicious concept erasure benchmarks, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness in erasing malicious concepts while better preserving the model's original generation ability. The code is available at: http://github.com/ddgoodgood/TRCE. CAUTION: This paper includes model-generated content that may contain offensive material.
title TRCE: Towards Reliable Malicious Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07389