arXiv AI

MidSteer: Optimal Affine Framework for Steering Generative Models

arXiv:2605. 05220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Steering intermediate representations has emerged as a powerful strategy for controlling generative models, particularly in post-deployment alignment and safety settings.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

GRACE: Adaptive Concept Erasure with Geometry-Guided Retention in Diffusion Models

GRACE is a new framework for concept erasure in text-to-image diffusion models that uses a semantically weighted sensitive subspace to guide localized interventions and lightweight subspace-constrained adapters to avoid global semantic disruption. It replaces manual counterfactual prompts with an automatically decoupled safe-anchor mechanism and controls intervention strength through an energy-driven dynamic gating system. Experiments show GRACE improves NSFW reduction by 17.86% over five state-of-the-art methods while also reducing target CLIP Score and FID, indicating stronger concept suppression with better preservation of generative quality.

By Qinghui Gong, Yihuai Liang, Yuanlun Xie, Deepak Kumar Jain, Vitomir \v{S}truc, Zhengchun Zhou
arXiv AI
Sep 15

DSS: Dynamic Semantic Steering for Robust Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

The paper introduces Dynamic Semantic Steering (DSS), a training‑free, inference‑time defense for robust concept erasure in text‑to‑image diffusion models. DSS models local semantic neighborhoods geometrically, automatically identifies benign semantic anchors, and applies context‑aware, constrained feature correction using cross‑attention signals. Experiments show DSS achieves an average erasure rate of 91.0%, outperforming prior defenses while reducing semantic drift and preserving generation fidelity.

By Qinghui Gong, Zhengchun Zhou, Hua Meng, Yihuai Liang, Yuxuan Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 2

RASteer: Retain-Aware Activation Steering for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

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 Machine Learning
Jul 24

Concept Concentration for Faithful Representation Intervention

arXiv:2505. 18672v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Representation intervention aims to localize and modify the representations that encode the underlying concepts in large language models (LLMs) to elicit the aligned and expected behaviors.

By Hongzheng Yang, Yongqiang Chen, Zeyu Qin, Tongliang Liu, Chaowei Xiao, Kun Zhang, Bo Han
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 7

Compositional Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Hierarchically Grounded Semantic Surgery

The paper introduces Hierarchically Grounded Semantic Surgery (HGSS), a training‑free method for removing specific concepts from text‑to‑image diffusion models without altering model weights. HGSS uses hierarchical span grounding to accurately identify target spans and dynamic attribute binding to refine text conditioning during early denoising, thereby preventing routing failures on compositional prompts. Experiments on SEE and UnlearnCanvas show that HGSS significantly reduces hierarchical evasion and attribute leakage, outperforming existing erasure techniques.

By Chen Dai, Ganyu Zou, Nathan Self, Kevin Piper, Ramachandra Rao Seethiraju, Karthik Shyamsunder, Chang-Tien Lu, Naren Ramakrishnan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Concept Modulation Models: A Unified Framework for Identifiability and Extrapolation

arXiv:2606. 18509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable generalization in conditional latent variable models requires understanding both identifiability and extrapolation: how observed variation across attributes determines latent structure, and how that structure determines distributions at unseen attributes.

By Soheun Yi, Yizhou Lu, Chandler Squires, Pradeep Ravikumar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Dynamically Scaled Activation Steering

arXiv:2512. 03661v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a powerful method for guiding the behavior of generative models towards desired outcomes such as toxicity mitigation.

By Alex Ferrando, Xavier Suau, Jordi Gonz\`alez, Pau Rodriguez