PurifyGen: A Risk-Discrimination and Semantic-Purification Model for Safe Text-to-Image Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cao, Zongsheng, He, Yangfan, Liu, Anran, Xie, Jun, Chen, Feng, Wang, Zepeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cao, Zongsheng
He, Yangfan
Liu, Anran
Xie, Jun
Chen, Feng
Wang, Zepeng
author_facet Cao, Zongsheng
He, Yangfan
Liu, Anran
Xie, Jun
Chen, Feng
Wang, Zepeng
contents Recent advances in diffusion models have notably enhanced text-to-image (T2I) generation quality, but they also raise the risk of generating unsafe content. Traditional safety methods like text blacklisting or harmful content classification have significant drawbacks: they can be easily circumvented or require extensive datasets and extra training. To overcome these challenges, we introduce PurifyGen, a novel, training-free approach for safe T2I generation that retains the model's original weights. PurifyGen introduces a dual-stage strategy for prompt purification. First, we evaluate the safety of each token in a prompt by computing its complementary semantic distance, which measures the semantic proximity between the prompt tokens and concept embeddings from predefined toxic and clean lists. This enables fine-grained prompt classification without explicit keyword matching or retraining. Tokens closer to toxic concepts are flagged as risky. Second, for risky prompts, we apply a dual-space transformation: we project toxic-aligned embeddings into the null space of the toxic concept matrix, effectively removing harmful semantic components, and simultaneously align them into the range space of clean concepts. This dual alignment purifies risky prompts by both subtracting unsafe semantics and reinforcing safe ones, while retaining the original intent and coherence. We further define a token-wise strategy to selectively replace only risky token embeddings, ensuring minimal disruption to safe content. PurifyGen offers a plug-and-play solution with theoretical grounding and strong generalization to unseen prompts and models. Extensive testing shows that PurifyGen surpasses current methods in reducing unsafe content across five datasets and competes well with training-dependent approaches. The code can refer to https://github.com/AI-Researcher-Team/PurifyGen.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23546
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PurifyGen: A Risk-Discrimination and Semantic-Purification Model for Safe Text-to-Image Generation
Cao, Zongsheng
He, Yangfan
Liu, Anran
Xie, Jun
Chen, Feng
Wang, Zepeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent advances in diffusion models have notably enhanced text-to-image (T2I) generation quality, but they also raise the risk of generating unsafe content. Traditional safety methods like text blacklisting or harmful content classification have significant drawbacks: they can be easily circumvented or require extensive datasets and extra training. To overcome these challenges, we introduce PurifyGen, a novel, training-free approach for safe T2I generation that retains the model's original weights. PurifyGen introduces a dual-stage strategy for prompt purification. First, we evaluate the safety of each token in a prompt by computing its complementary semantic distance, which measures the semantic proximity between the prompt tokens and concept embeddings from predefined toxic and clean lists. This enables fine-grained prompt classification without explicit keyword matching or retraining. Tokens closer to toxic concepts are flagged as risky. Second, for risky prompts, we apply a dual-space transformation: we project toxic-aligned embeddings into the null space of the toxic concept matrix, effectively removing harmful semantic components, and simultaneously align them into the range space of clean concepts. This dual alignment purifies risky prompts by both subtracting unsafe semantics and reinforcing safe ones, while retaining the original intent and coherence. We further define a token-wise strategy to selectively replace only risky token embeddings, ensuring minimal disruption to safe content. PurifyGen offers a plug-and-play solution with theoretical grounding and strong generalization to unseen prompts and models. Extensive testing shows that PurifyGen surpasses current methods in reducing unsafe content across five datasets and competes well with training-dependent approaches. The code can refer to https://github.com/AI-Researcher-Team/PurifyGen.
title PurifyGen: A Risk-Discrimination and Semantic-Purification Model for Safe Text-to-Image Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23546