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Main Authors: Mansi, Kori, Avinash, Toni, Francesca, Demetriou, Soteris
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07919
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author Mansi
Kori, Avinash
Toni, Francesca
Demetriou, Soteris
author_facet Mansi
Kori, Avinash
Toni, Francesca
Demetriou, Soteris
contents Text guided diffusion models are used by millions of users, but can be easily exploited to produce harmful content. Concept unlearning methods aim at reducing the models' likelihood of generating harmful content. Traditionally, this has been tackled at an individual concept level, with only a handful of recent works considering more realistic concept combinations. However, state of the art methods depend on full finetuning, which is computationally expensive. Concept localisation methods can facilitate selective finetuning, but existing techniques are static, resulting in suboptimal utility. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose TRUST (Targeted Robust Selective fine Tuning), a novel approach for dynamically estimating target concept neurons and unlearning them through selective finetuning, empowered by a Hessian based regularization. We show experimentally, against a number of SOTA baselines, that TRUST is robust against adversarial prompts, preserves generation quality to a significant degree, and is also significantly faster than the SOTA. Our method achieves unlearning of not only individual concepts but also combinations of concepts and conditional concepts, without any specific regularization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07919
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Selective Fine-Tuning for Targeted and Robust Concept Unlearning
Mansi
Kori, Avinash
Toni, Francesca
Demetriou, Soteris
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Text guided diffusion models are used by millions of users, but can be easily exploited to produce harmful content. Concept unlearning methods aim at reducing the models' likelihood of generating harmful content. Traditionally, this has been tackled at an individual concept level, with only a handful of recent works considering more realistic concept combinations. However, state of the art methods depend on full finetuning, which is computationally expensive. Concept localisation methods can facilitate selective finetuning, but existing techniques are static, resulting in suboptimal utility. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose TRUST (Targeted Robust Selective fine Tuning), a novel approach for dynamically estimating target concept neurons and unlearning them through selective finetuning, empowered by a Hessian based regularization. We show experimentally, against a number of SOTA baselines, that TRUST is robust against adversarial prompts, preserves generation quality to a significant degree, and is also significantly faster than the SOTA. Our method achieves unlearning of not only individual concepts but also combinations of concepts and conditional concepts, without any specific regularization.
title Selective Fine-Tuning for Targeted and Robust Concept Unlearning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07919