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Main Authors: Zhang, Lingyun, Xie, Yu, Fang, Zhongli, Liu, Yu, Chen, Ping
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03941
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author Zhang, Lingyun
Xie, Yu
Fang, Zhongli
Liu, Yu
Chen, Ping
author_facet Zhang, Lingyun
Xie, Yu
Fang, Zhongli
Liu, Yu
Chen, Ping
contents The widespread deployment of text-to-image diffusion models is significantly challenged by the generation of visually harmful content, such as sexually explicit content, violence, and horror imagery. Common safety interventions, ranging from input filtering to model concept erasure, often suffer from two critical limitations: (1) a severe trade-off between safety and context preservation, where removing unsafe concepts degrades the fidelity of the safe content, and (2) vulnerability to adversarial attacks, where safety mechanisms are easily bypassed. To address these challenges, we propose SafeCtrl, a Region-Aware safety control framework operating on a Detect-Then-Suppress paradigm. Unlike global safety interventions, SafeCtrl first employs an attention-guided Detect module to precisely localize specific risk regions. Subsequently, a localized Suppress module, optimized via image-level Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), neutralizes harmful semantics only within the detected areas, effectively transforming unsafe objects into safe alternatives while leaving the surrounding context intact. Extensive experiments across multiple risk categories demonstrate that SafeCtrl achieves a superior trade-off between safety and fidelity compared to state-of-the-art methods. Crucially, our approach exhibits improved resilience against adversarial prompt attacks, offering a precise and robust solution for responsible generation.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SafeCtrl: Region-Aware Safety Control for Text-to-Image Diffusion via Detect-Then-Suppress
Zhang, Lingyun
Xie, Yu
Fang, Zhongli
Liu, Yu
Chen, Ping
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The widespread deployment of text-to-image diffusion models is significantly challenged by the generation of visually harmful content, such as sexually explicit content, violence, and horror imagery. Common safety interventions, ranging from input filtering to model concept erasure, often suffer from two critical limitations: (1) a severe trade-off between safety and context preservation, where removing unsafe concepts degrades the fidelity of the safe content, and (2) vulnerability to adversarial attacks, where safety mechanisms are easily bypassed. To address these challenges, we propose SafeCtrl, a Region-Aware safety control framework operating on a Detect-Then-Suppress paradigm. Unlike global safety interventions, SafeCtrl first employs an attention-guided Detect module to precisely localize specific risk regions. Subsequently, a localized Suppress module, optimized via image-level Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), neutralizes harmful semantics only within the detected areas, effectively transforming unsafe objects into safe alternatives while leaving the surrounding context intact. Extensive experiments across multiple risk categories demonstrate that SafeCtrl achieves a superior trade-off between safety and fidelity compared to state-of-the-art methods. Crucially, our approach exhibits improved resilience against adversarial prompt attacks, offering a precise and robust solution for responsible generation.
title SafeCtrl: Region-Aware Safety Control for Text-to-Image Diffusion via Detect-Then-Suppress
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03941