FADE: Adversarial Concept Erasure in Flow Models

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable image generation capabilities, but also pose risks in privacy and fairness by memorizing sensitive concepts or perpetuating biases. We propose a novel \textbf{concept erasure} method for text-to-image diffusion models, designed to remove specified concepts (e.g., a private individual or a harmful stereotype) from the model's generative repertoire. Our method, termed \textbf{FADE} (Fair Adversarial Diffusion Erasure), combines a trajectory-aware fine-tuning strategy with an adversarial objective to ensure the concept is reliably removed while preserving overall model fidelity. Theoretically, we prove a formal guarantee that our approach minimizes the mutual information between the erased concept and the model's outputs, ensuring privacy and fairness. Empirically, we evaluate FADE on Stable Diffusion and FLUX, using benchmarks from prior work (e.g., object, celebrity, explicit content, and style erasure tasks from MACE). FADE achieves state-of-the-art concept removal performance, surpassing recent baselines like ESD, UCE, MACE, and ANT in terms of removal efficacy and image quality. Notably, FADE improves the harmonic mean of concept removal and fidelity by 5--10\% over the best prior method. We also conduct an ablation study to validate each component of FADE, confirming that our adversarial and trajectory-preserving objectives each contribute to its superior performance. Our work sets a new standard for safe and fair generative modeling by unlearning specified concepts without retraining from scratch.

TRACE: Trajectory-Constrained Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown unprecedented generative capability, but their ability to produce undesirable concepts (e.g.~pornographic content, sensitive identities, copyrighted styles) poses serious concerns for privacy, fairness, and safety. {Concept erasure} aims to remove or suppress specific concept information in a generative model. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{TRACE (Trajectory-Constrained Attentional Concept Erasure)}, a novel method to erase targeted concepts from diffusion models while preserving overall generative quality. Our approach combines a rigorous theoretical framework, establishing formal conditions under which a concept can be provably suppressed in the diffusion process, with an effective fine-tuning procedure compatible with both conventional latent diffusion (Stable Diffusion) and emerging rectified flow models (e.g.~FLUX). We first derive a closed-form update to the model's cross-attention layers that removes hidden representations of the target concept. We then introduce a trajectory-aware finetuning objective that steers the denoising process away from the concept only in the late sampling stages, thus maintaining the model's fidelity on unrelated content. Empirically, we evaluate TRACE on multiple benchmarks used in prior concept erasure studies (object classes, celebrity faces, artistic styles, and explicit content from the I2P dataset). TRACE achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming recent methods such as ANT, EraseAnything, and MACE in terms of removal efficacy and output quality.

ACE: Attentional Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Large text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable image synthesis capabilities, but their indiscriminate training on Internet-scale data has led to learned concepts that enable harmful, copyrighted, or otherwise undesirable content generation. We address the task of concept erasure in diffusion models, i.e., removing a specified concept from a pre-trained model such that prompting the concept (or related synonyms) no longer yields its depiction, while preserving the model's ability to generate other content. We propose a novel method, Attentional Concept Erasure (ACE), that integrates a closed-form attention manipulation with lightweight fine-tuning. Theoretically, we formulate concept erasure as aligning the model's conditional distribution on the target concept with a neutral distribution. Our approach identifies and nullifies concept-specific latent directions in the cross-attention modules via a gated low-rank adaptation, followed by adversarially augmented fine-tuning to ensure thorough erasure of the concept and its synonyms. Empirically, we demonstrate on multiple benchmarks, including object classes, celebrity faces, explicit content, and artistic styles, that ACE achieves state-of-the-art concept removal efficacy and robustness. Compared to prior methods, ACE better balances generality (erasing concept and related terms) and specificity (preserving unrelated content), scales to dozens of concepts, and is efficient, requiring only a few seconds of adaptation per concept. We will release our code to facilitate safer deployment of diffusion models.