SafeRedir: Prompt Embedding Redirection for Robust Unlearning in Image Generation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Renyang, Chen, Kangjie, Qiu, Han, Zhang, Jie, Lam, Kwok-Yan, Zhang, Tianwei, Ng, See-Kiong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Liu, Renyang
Chen, Kangjie
Qiu, Han
Zhang, Jie
Lam, Kwok-Yan
Zhang, Tianwei
Ng, See-Kiong
author_facet Liu, Renyang
Chen, Kangjie
Qiu, Han
Zhang, Jie
Lam, Kwok-Yan
Zhang, Tianwei
Ng, See-Kiong
contents Image generation models (IGMs), while capable of producing impressive and creative content, often memorize a wide range of undesirable concepts from their training data, leading to the reproduction of unsafe content such as NSFW imagery and copyrighted artistic styles. Such behaviors pose persistent safety and compliance risks in real-world deployments and cannot be reliably mitigated by post-hoc filtering, owing to the limited robustness of such mechanisms and a lack of fine-grained semantic control. Recent unlearning methods seek to erase harmful concepts at the model level, which exhibit the limitations of requiring costly retraining, degrading the quality of benign generations, or failing to withstand prompt paraphrasing and adversarial attacks. To address these challenges, we introduce SafeRedir, a lightweight inference-time framework for robust unlearning via prompt embedding redirection. Without modifying the underlying IGMs, SafeRedir adaptively routes unsafe prompts toward safe semantic regions through token-level interventions in the embedding space. The framework comprises two core components: a latent-aware multi-modal safety classifier for identifying unsafe generation trajectories, and a token-level delta generator for precise semantic redirection, equipped with auxiliary predictors for token masking and adaptive scaling to localize and regulate the intervention. Empirical results across multiple representative unlearning tasks demonstrate that SafeRedir achieves effective unlearning capability, high semantic and perceptual preservation, robust image quality, and enhanced resistance to adversarial attacks. Furthermore, SafeRedir generalizes effectively across a variety of diffusion backbones and existing unlearned models, validating its plug-and-play compatibility and broad applicability. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ryliu68/SafeRedir.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_08623
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SafeRedir: Prompt Embedding Redirection for Robust Unlearning in Image Generation Models
Liu, Renyang
Chen, Kangjie
Qiu, Han
Zhang, Jie
Lam, Kwok-Yan
Zhang, Tianwei
Ng, See-Kiong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Image generation models (IGMs), while capable of producing impressive and creative content, often memorize a wide range of undesirable concepts from their training data, leading to the reproduction of unsafe content such as NSFW imagery and copyrighted artistic styles. Such behaviors pose persistent safety and compliance risks in real-world deployments and cannot be reliably mitigated by post-hoc filtering, owing to the limited robustness of such mechanisms and a lack of fine-grained semantic control. Recent unlearning methods seek to erase harmful concepts at the model level, which exhibit the limitations of requiring costly retraining, degrading the quality of benign generations, or failing to withstand prompt paraphrasing and adversarial attacks. To address these challenges, we introduce SafeRedir, a lightweight inference-time framework for robust unlearning via prompt embedding redirection. Without modifying the underlying IGMs, SafeRedir adaptively routes unsafe prompts toward safe semantic regions through token-level interventions in the embedding space. The framework comprises two core components: a latent-aware multi-modal safety classifier for identifying unsafe generation trajectories, and a token-level delta generator for precise semantic redirection, equipped with auxiliary predictors for token masking and adaptive scaling to localize and regulate the intervention. Empirical results across multiple representative unlearning tasks demonstrate that SafeRedir achieves effective unlearning capability, high semantic and perceptual preservation, robust image quality, and enhanced resistance to adversarial attacks. Furthermore, SafeRedir generalizes effectively across a variety of diffusion backbones and existing unlearned models, validating its plug-and-play compatibility and broad applicability. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ryliu68/SafeRedir.
title SafeRedir: Prompt Embedding Redirection for Robust Unlearning in Image Generation Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08623