DREAM: Scalable Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Generative Systems via Distribution Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Boheng, Wang, Junjie, Li, Yiming, Hu, Zhiyang, Qi, Leyi, Dong, Jianshuo, Wang, Run, Qiu, Han, Qin, Zhan, Zhang, Tianwei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Boheng
Wang, Junjie
Li, Yiming
Hu, Zhiyang
Qi, Leyi
Dong, Jianshuo
Wang, Run
Qiu, Han
Qin, Zhan
Zhang, Tianwei
author_facet Li, Boheng
Wang, Junjie
Li, Yiming
Hu, Zhiyang
Qi, Leyi
Dong, Jianshuo
Wang, Run
Qiu, Han
Qin, Zhan
Zhang, Tianwei
contents Despite the integration of safety alignment and external filters, text-to-image (T2I) generative systems are still susceptible to producing harmful content, such as sexual or violent imagery. This raises serious concerns about unintended exposure and potential misuse. Red teaming, which aims to proactively identify diverse prompts that can elicit unsafe outputs from the T2I system, is increasingly recognized as an essential method for assessing and improving safety before real-world deployment. However, existing automated red teaming approaches often treat prompt discovery as an isolated, prompt-level optimization task, which limits their scalability, diversity, and overall effectiveness. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose DREAM, a scalable red teaming framework to automatically uncover diverse problematic prompts from a given T2I system. Unlike prior work that optimizes prompts individually, DREAM directly models the probabilistic distribution of the target system's problematic prompts, which enables explicit optimization over both effectiveness and diversity, and allows efficient large-scale sampling after training. To achieve this without direct access to representative training samples, we draw inspiration from energy-based models and reformulate the objective into a simple and tractable form. We further introduce GC-SPSA, an efficient optimization algorithm that provides stable gradient estimates through the long and potentially non-differentiable T2I pipeline. During inference, we also propose a diversity-aware sampling strategy to enhance prompt variety. The effectiveness of DREAM is validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of T2I models and safety filters in terms of both prompt success rate and diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/AntigoneRandy/DREAM
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_16329
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DREAM: Scalable Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Generative Systems via Distribution Modeling
Li, Boheng
Wang, Junjie
Li, Yiming
Hu, Zhiyang
Qi, Leyi
Dong, Jianshuo
Wang, Run
Qiu, Han
Qin, Zhan
Zhang, Tianwei
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Despite the integration of safety alignment and external filters, text-to-image (T2I) generative systems are still susceptible to producing harmful content, such as sexual or violent imagery. This raises serious concerns about unintended exposure and potential misuse. Red teaming, which aims to proactively identify diverse prompts that can elicit unsafe outputs from the T2I system, is increasingly recognized as an essential method for assessing and improving safety before real-world deployment. However, existing automated red teaming approaches often treat prompt discovery as an isolated, prompt-level optimization task, which limits their scalability, diversity, and overall effectiveness. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose DREAM, a scalable red teaming framework to automatically uncover diverse problematic prompts from a given T2I system. Unlike prior work that optimizes prompts individually, DREAM directly models the probabilistic distribution of the target system's problematic prompts, which enables explicit optimization over both effectiveness and diversity, and allows efficient large-scale sampling after training. To achieve this without direct access to representative training samples, we draw inspiration from energy-based models and reformulate the objective into a simple and tractable form. We further introduce GC-SPSA, an efficient optimization algorithm that provides stable gradient estimates through the long and potentially non-differentiable T2I pipeline. During inference, we also propose a diversity-aware sampling strategy to enhance prompt variety. The effectiveness of DREAM is validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of T2I models and safety filters in terms of both prompt success rate and diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/AntigoneRandy/DREAM
title DREAM: Scalable Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Generative Systems via Distribution Modeling
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16329