# Get What You Want, Not What You Don't: Image Content Suppression for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05375 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05375/

## Key facts

- Cited by 63 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 31 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07345/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [Blended Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02779/) (2022)
- [Ablating Concepts in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13516/) (2023)
- [Forget-Me-Not: Learning to Forget in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17591/) (2023)
- [Negative-prompt Inversion: Fast Image Inversion for Editing with Text-guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16807/) (2023)
- [Localizing Object-level Shape Variations with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11306/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Prompt Learning: Addressing Cross-Attention Leakage for Text-Based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15664/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [SAeUron: Interpretable Concept Unlearning in Diffusion Models with Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18052/) (2025)
- [Controlling Language and Diffusion Models by Transporting Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23054/) (2024)
- [Attentive Eraser: Unleashing Diffusion Model's Object Removal Potential via Self-Attention Redirection Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12974/) (2024)
- [R.A.C.E.: Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure for Secure Text-to-Image Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16341/) (2024)
- [UnlearnCanvas: Stylized Image Dataset for Enhanced Machine Unlearning Evaluation in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11846/) (2024)
- [Continuous, Subject-Specific Attribute Control in T2I Models by Identifying Semantic Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17064/) (2024)
- [Precise, Fast, and Low-cost Concept Erasure in Value Space: Orthogonal Complement Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06143/) (2024)
- [Token Merging for Training-Free Semantic Binding in Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07132/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Negative Guidance of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14398/) (2024)
- [Fantastic Copyrighted Beasts and How (Not) to Generate Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14526/) (2024)
- [Magnet: We Never Know How Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Work, Until We Learn How Vision-Language Models Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19967/) (2024)
- [Targeted Unlearning with Single Layer Unlearning Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11867/) (2024)
- [TRCE: Towards Reliable Malicious Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07389/) (2025)
- [AudioEditor: A Training-Free Diffusion-Based Audio Editing Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12466/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuning Visual Autoregressive Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02612/) (2025)
- [Backdooring Bias (B2) into Stable Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15213/) (2024)
- [Compositional Video Generation as Flow Equalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06182/) (2024)
- [Growth Inhibitors for Suppressing Inappropriate Image Concepts in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01014/) (2024)
- [Replication in Visual Diffusion Models: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00001/) (2024)
- [SAEmnesia: Erasing Concepts in Diffusion Models with Supervised Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21379/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14896/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Machine Unlearning in Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02761/) (2025)
- [EraseFlow: Learning Concept Erasure Policies via GFlowNet-Driven Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00804/) (2025)
- [CE-SDWV: Effective and Efficient Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via a Semantic-Driven Word Vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15562/) (2025)
- [Free-Lunch Color-Texture Disentanglement for Stylized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14275/) (2025)
- [Model Integrity when Unlearning with T2I Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02068/) (2024)
- [AEGIS: Adversarial Target-Guided Retention-Data-Free Robust Concept Erasure from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06771/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Attention Analysis for Backdoor Detection in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20518/) (2025)
- [From Cradle to Cane: A Two-Pass Framework for High-Fidelity Lifespan Face Aging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20977/) (2025)
- [AgeBooth: Controllable Facial Aging and Rejuvenation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05715/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of recent text-to-image diffusion models is largely due to their capacity to be guided by a complex text prompt, which enables users to precisely describe the desired content. However, these models struggle to effectively suppress the generation of undesired content, which is explicitly requested to be omitted from the generated image in the prompt. In this paper, we analyze how to manipulate the text embeddings and remove unwanted content from them. We introduce two contributions, which we refer to as textitsoft-weighted regularization and textitinference-time text embedding optimization. The first regularizes the text embedding matrix and effectively suppresses the undesired content. The second method aims to further suppress the unwanted content generation of the prompt, and encourages the generation of desired content. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively on extensive experiments, validating its effectiveness. Furthermore, our method is generalizability to both the pixel-space diffusion models (i.e. DeepFloyd-IF) and the latent-space diffusion models (i.e. Stable Diffusion).