Empty SPACE: Cross-Attention Sparsity for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Novello, Nicola, Tonello, Andrea M.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Novello, Nicola
Tonello, Andrea M.
author_facet Novello, Nicola
Tonello, Andrea M.
contents Erasing specific concepts from text-to-image diffusion models is essential for avoiding the generation of copyrighted and explicit content. Closed-form concept erasure methods offer a fast alternative to backpropagation-based techniques, but they become less effective when scaling from smaller models such as Stable Diffusion 1.5 to larger models like Stable Diffusion XL. To maintain erasure effectiveness in these larger-scale architectures, we propose SParse cross-Attention-based Concept Erasure (SPACE). SPACE iteratively modifies the cross-attention parameters of a model with a closed-form update that jointly induces sparsity and erases target concepts. By concentrating the concept mapping to a lower-dimensional subspace, SPACE achieves superior erasure efficacy compared to dense baselines. Extensive experimental results show improvements in erasure effectiveness and robustness against adversarial prompts. Furthermore, SPACE achieves 80\%-90\% cross-attention sparsity, reducing the storage requirements for saving the modified parameters by 70\%, demonstrating its memory efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Empty SPACE: Cross-Attention Sparsity for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models
Novello, Nicola
Tonello, Andrea M.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Erasing specific concepts from text-to-image diffusion models is essential for avoiding the generation of copyrighted and explicit content. Closed-form concept erasure methods offer a fast alternative to backpropagation-based techniques, but they become less effective when scaling from smaller models such as Stable Diffusion 1.5 to larger models like Stable Diffusion XL. To maintain erasure effectiveness in these larger-scale architectures, we propose SParse cross-Attention-based Concept Erasure (SPACE). SPACE iteratively modifies the cross-attention parameters of a model with a closed-form update that jointly induces sparsity and erases target concepts. By concentrating the concept mapping to a lower-dimensional subspace, SPACE achieves superior erasure efficacy compared to dense baselines. Extensive experimental results show improvements in erasure effectiveness and robustness against adversarial prompts. Furthermore, SPACE achieves 80\%-90\% cross-attention sparsity, reducing the storage requirements for saving the modified parameters by 70\%, demonstrating its memory efficiency.
title Empty SPACE: Cross-Attention Sparsity for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10198