Concept Unlearning by Modeling Key Steps of Diffusion Process

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Chaoshuo, Lin, Chenhao, Zhao, Zhengyu, Yang, Le, Wang, Qian, Shen, Chao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Chaoshuo
Lin, Chenhao
Zhao, Zhengyu
Yang, Le
Wang, Qian
Shen, Chao
author_facet Zhang, Chaoshuo
Lin, Chenhao
Zhao, Zhengyu
Yang, Le
Wang, Qian
Shen, Chao
contents Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs), represented by Stable Diffusion, which generate highly realistic images based on textual input, have been widely used, but their flexibility also makes them prone to misuse for producing harmful or unsafe content. Concept unlearning has been used to prevent text-to-image diffusion models from being misused to generate undesirable visual content. However, existing methods struggle to trade off unlearning effectiveness with the preservation of generation quality. To address this limitation, we propose Key Step Concept Unlearning (KSCU), which selectively fine-tunes the model at key steps to the target concept. KSCU is inspired by the fact that different diffusion denoising steps contribute unequally to the final generation. Compared to previous approaches, which treat all denoising steps uniformly, KSCU avoids over-optimization of unnecessary steps for higher effectiveness and reduces the number of parameter updates for higher efficiency. For example, on the I2P dataset, KSCU outperforms ESD by 8.3% in nudity unlearning accuracy while improving FID by 8.4%, and achieves a high overall score of 0.92, substantially surpassing all other SOTA methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06526
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Concept Unlearning by Modeling Key Steps of Diffusion Process
Zhang, Chaoshuo
Lin, Chenhao
Zhao, Zhengyu
Yang, Le
Wang, Qian
Shen, Chao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs), represented by Stable Diffusion, which generate highly realistic images based on textual input, have been widely used, but their flexibility also makes them prone to misuse for producing harmful or unsafe content. Concept unlearning has been used to prevent text-to-image diffusion models from being misused to generate undesirable visual content. However, existing methods struggle to trade off unlearning effectiveness with the preservation of generation quality. To address this limitation, we propose Key Step Concept Unlearning (KSCU), which selectively fine-tunes the model at key steps to the target concept. KSCU is inspired by the fact that different diffusion denoising steps contribute unequally to the final generation. Compared to previous approaches, which treat all denoising steps uniformly, KSCU avoids over-optimization of unnecessary steps for higher effectiveness and reduces the number of parameter updates for higher efficiency. For example, on the I2P dataset, KSCU outperforms ESD by 8.3% in nudity unlearning accuracy while improving FID by 8.4%, and achieves a high overall score of 0.92, substantially surpassing all other SOTA methods.
title Concept Unlearning by Modeling Key Steps of Diffusion Process
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06526