ReTrack: Data Unlearning in Diffusion Models through Redirecting the Denoising Trajectory

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shi, Qitan, Jin, Cheng, Zhang, Jiawei, Gu, Yuantao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shi, Qitan
Jin, Cheng
Zhang, Jiawei
Gu, Yuantao
author_facet Shi, Qitan
Jin, Cheng
Zhang, Jiawei
Gu, Yuantao
contents Diffusion models excel at generating high-quality, diverse images but suffer from training data memorization, raising critical privacy and safety concerns. Data unlearning has emerged to mitigate this issue by removing the influence of specific data without retraining from scratch. We propose ReTrack, a fast and effective data unlearning method for diffusion models. ReTrack employs importance sampling to construct a more efficient fine-tuning loss, which we approximate by retaining only dominant terms. This yields an interpretable objective that redirects denoising trajectories toward the $k$-nearest neighbors, enabling efficient unlearning while preserving generative quality. Experiments on MNIST T-Shirt, CelebA-HQ, CIFAR-10, and Stable Diffusion show that ReTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance, striking the best trade-off between unlearning strength and generation quality preservation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13007
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ReTrack: Data Unlearning in Diffusion Models through Redirecting the Denoising Trajectory
Shi, Qitan
Jin, Cheng
Zhang, Jiawei
Gu, Yuantao
Machine Learning
Diffusion models excel at generating high-quality, diverse images but suffer from training data memorization, raising critical privacy and safety concerns. Data unlearning has emerged to mitigate this issue by removing the influence of specific data without retraining from scratch. We propose ReTrack, a fast and effective data unlearning method for diffusion models. ReTrack employs importance sampling to construct a more efficient fine-tuning loss, which we approximate by retaining only dominant terms. This yields an interpretable objective that redirects denoising trajectories toward the $k$-nearest neighbors, enabling efficient unlearning while preserving generative quality. Experiments on MNIST T-Shirt, CelebA-HQ, CIFAR-10, and Stable Diffusion show that ReTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance, striking the best trade-off between unlearning strength and generation quality preservation.
title ReTrack: Data Unlearning in Diffusion Models through Redirecting the Denoising Trajectory
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13007