The paper presents a preference-driven unlearning framework for few-step distilled text-to-image diffusion models. It identifies that standard Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) fails on these models due to altered generation dynamics and proposes a modified formulation aligned with few-step properties. The method enables direct concept removal while preserving desirable capabilities, and is evaluated on identity, NSFW, and object-level unlearning tasks with strong forgetting and retention results.
By Gaurav Patel, Jun Fang, Greg Ver Steeg, Qiang Qiu, Sravan Sripada
arXiv:2604. 05634v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine unlearning (MU) has become a critical technique for GenAI models' safe and compliant operation.
By Zhiyong Ma, Zhitao Deng, Huan Tang, Jialin Chen, Zhijun Zheng, Zhengping Li, Qingyuan Chuai
arXiv:2609.37537v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Machine unlearning has emerged as a critical post-hoc safety measure to erase sensitive concepts from Text-to-Image (T2I) models without prohibitive re...
By Arian Komaei Koma, Seyed Amir Kasaei, Aida Aryafar, Matin Ghiasi, Ali Aghayari, Amirhossein Souri, Mohammad Mosayyebi, AmirMahdi Sadeghzadeh, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
arXiv:2607. 06432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept unlearning in text-to-image diffusion models is critical for safe and practical deployment: with rising privacy concerns, copyright disputes, trademark constraints, and safety regulations, deployed systems must be able to suppress unwanted concepts after training.
By Naveen George, Naoki Murata, Yuhta Takida, Konda Reddy Mopuri, Yuki Mitsufuji
Diffusion unlearning is essential for mitigating the generation of harmful or copyrighted content in text-to-image models. Current diffusion unlearning techniques determine the model update direction by either using alternatives of the target concept as an anchor or using empty prompts.
Reference-Guided Machine Unlearning (ReGUn) is a vision unlearning framework that prioritizes distributional indistinguishability over degradation-based heuristics. It uses disjoint held-out data to create a class-conditioned reference distribution for distillation, guiding forget samples toward non-member behavior without explicitly degrading predictions. Experiments across various architectures and datasets show that ReGUn achieves a competitive forgetting–utility trade-off and closely matches retrain-like membership inference behavior.
By Jonas Mirlach, Sonia Laguna, Julia E. Vogt
arXiv:2512. 02657v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world deployment of text-to-image diffusion models requires continual concept removal as new privacy, copyright, or safety obligations arise over time.
By Naveen George, Naoki Murata, Yuhta Takida, Konda Reddy Mopuri, Yuki Mitsufuji
RASteer is a training‑free method for concept erasure in text‑to‑image diffusion models that retains other concepts. It constructs a retain subspace from concepts to preserve, then removes components aligned with this subspace from the erasure direction using Retain‑Orthogonal Steering (ROS). Overlap‑Adaptive Calibration (OAC) further adjusts the removal of shared components at each layer and denoising step, balancing target erasure with concept preservation. Experiments show RASteer matches or outperforms existing activation steering and weight editing baselines on unsafe‑content, instance, and artistic‑style erasure tasks across multiple backbones and benchmarks.
By Yongliang Wu, Haori Lu, Yulun Wu, Jinqi Luo, Xingyu Zhu, Yaoyao Liu
arXiv:2606.24192v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models. However, existing methods often remove...
By Miso Kim, Georu Lee, Yunji Kim, Hoki Kim, Jinseong Park, Woojin Lee
arXiv:2606. 24192v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models.
By Miso Kim, Georu Lee, Yunji Kim, Hoki Kim, Jinseong Park, Woojin Lee
The paper introduces Diffusion LAIR, a listwise preference optimization technique that leverages continuous reward scores instead of binary pairwise comparisons to align text‑to‑image diffusion models. LAIR transforms reward scores into centered advantage weights and optimizes an advantage‑weighted regression objective on an implicit reward defined by denoising‑loss improvement over a reference model, with a quadratic penalty to regulate reward magnitude. Experiments demonstrate that Diffusion LAIR surpasses strong baseline methods on SD1.5 and SDXL across generation, compositional, and editing tasks.
By Austin Wang, Jiaqi Han, Stefano Ermon, Yisong Yue
arXiv:2609.01433v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Concept erasure aims to suppress unsafe, privacy-sensitive, or undesirable generations in text-to-image diffusion models while preserving benign semant...
By Qinghui Gong, Xunlei Chen, Yu-Xuan Zhang, Hua Meng, Zhengchun Zhou