PROBE: Diagnosing Residual Concept Capacity in Erased Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

Concept erasure techniques for text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models report substantial suppression of sensitive content, yet current evaluation is limited to checking whether the target concept is absent from generated frames, treating output-level suppression as evidence of representational removal. We introduce PROBE, a diagnostic protocol that quantifies the \textit{reactivation potential} of erased concepts in T2V models. With all model parameters frozen, PROBE optimizes a lightweight pseudo-token embedding through a denoising reconstruction objective combined with a novel latent alignment constraint that anchors recovery to the spatiotemporal structure of the original concept. We make three contributions: (1) a multi-level evaluation framework spanning classifier-based detection, semantic similarity, temporal reactivation analysis, and human validation; (2) systematic experiments across three T2V architectures, three concept categories, and three erasure strategies revealing that all tested methods leave measurable residual capacity whose robustness correlates with intervention depth; and (3) the identification of temporal re-emergence, a video-specific failure mode where suppressed concepts progressively resurface across frames, invisible to frame-level metrics. These findings suggest that current erasure methods achieve output-level suppression rather than representational removal. We release our protocol to support reproducible safety auditing. Our code is available at https://github.com/YiweiXie/PRObingBasedEvaluation.

Erasing Concepts, Steering Generations: A Comprehensive Survey of Concept Suppression

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-quality and diverse visual content from natural language prompts. However, uncontrolled reproduction of sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful imagery poses serious ethical, legal, and safety challenges. To address these concerns, the concept erasure paradigm has emerged as a promising direction, enabling the selective removal of specific semantic concepts from generative models while preserving their overall utility. This survey provides a comprehensive overview and in-depth synthesis of concept erasure techniques in T2I diffusion models. We systematically categorize existing approaches along three key dimensions: intervention level, which identifies specific model components targeted for concept removal; optimization structure, referring to the algorithmic strategies employed to achieve suppression; and semantic scope, concerning the complexity and nature of the concepts addressed. This multi-dimensional taxonomy enables clear, structured comparisons across diverse methodologies, highlighting fundamental trade-offs between erasure specificity, generalization, and computational complexity. We further discuss current evaluation benchmarks, standardized metrics, and practical datasets, emphasizing gaps that limit comprehensive assessment, particularly regarding robustness and practical effectiveness. Finally, we outline major challenges and promising future directions, including disentanglement of concept representations, adaptive and incremental erasure strategies, adversarial robustness, and new generative architectures. This survey aims to guide researchers toward safer, more ethically aligned generative models, providing foundational knowledge and actionable recommendations to advance responsible development in generative AI.