The Dual Power of Interpretable Token Embeddings: Jailbreaking Attacks and Defenses for Diffusion Model Unlearning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Siyi, Zhang, Yimeng, Liu, Sijia, Qu, Qing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Siyi
Zhang, Yimeng
Liu, Sijia
Qu, Qing
author_facet Chen, Siyi
Zhang, Yimeng
Liu, Sijia
Qu, Qing
contents Despite the remarkable generation capabilities of diffusion models, recent studies have shown that they can memorize and create harmful content when given specific text prompts. Although fine-tuning approaches have been developed to mitigate this issue by unlearning harmful concepts, these methods can be easily circumvented through jailbreaking attacks. This implies that the harmful concept has not been fully erased from the model. However, existing jailbreaking attack methods, while effective, lack interpretability regarding why unlearned models still retain the concept, thereby hindering the development of defense strategies. In this work, we address these limitations by proposing an attack method that learns an orthogonal set of interpretable attack token embeddings. The attack token embeddings can be decomposed into human-interpretable textual elements, revealing that unlearned models still retain the target concept through implicit textual components. Furthermore, these attack token embeddings are powerful and transferable across text prompts, initial noises, and unlearned models, emphasizing that unlearned models are more vulnerable than expected. Finally, building on the insights from our interpretable attack, we develop a defense method to protect unlearned models against both our proposed and existing jailbreaking attacks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack and defense strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_21307
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Dual Power of Interpretable Token Embeddings: Jailbreaking Attacks and Defenses for Diffusion Model Unlearning
Chen, Siyi
Zhang, Yimeng
Liu, Sijia
Qu, Qing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Despite the remarkable generation capabilities of diffusion models, recent studies have shown that they can memorize and create harmful content when given specific text prompts. Although fine-tuning approaches have been developed to mitigate this issue by unlearning harmful concepts, these methods can be easily circumvented through jailbreaking attacks. This implies that the harmful concept has not been fully erased from the model. However, existing jailbreaking attack methods, while effective, lack interpretability regarding why unlearned models still retain the concept, thereby hindering the development of defense strategies. In this work, we address these limitations by proposing an attack method that learns an orthogonal set of interpretable attack token embeddings. The attack token embeddings can be decomposed into human-interpretable textual elements, revealing that unlearned models still retain the target concept through implicit textual components. Furthermore, these attack token embeddings are powerful and transferable across text prompts, initial noises, and unlearned models, emphasizing that unlearned models are more vulnerable than expected. Finally, building on the insights from our interpretable attack, we develop a defense method to protect unlearned models against both our proposed and existing jailbreaking attacks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack and defense strategies.
title The Dual Power of Interpretable Token Embeddings: Jailbreaking Attacks and Defenses for Diffusion Model Unlearning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21307