# Mining Your Own Secrets: Diffusion Classifier Scores for Continual Personalization of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00700 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00700/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 37 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 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 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [Progress & Compress: A scalable framework for continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06370/) (2018)
- [Class-incremental learning: survey and performance evaluation on image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15277/) (2020)
- [LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09673/) (2024)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [Your Diffusion Model is Secretly a Zero-Shot Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16203/) (2023)
- [VeRA: Vector-based Random Matrix Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11454/) (2023)
- [Class-incremental Learning via Deep Model Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07864/) (2019)
- [Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15233/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Low-Rank Continual Personalization of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04891/) (2024)
- [When Distillation Breaks Motion Control: Restoring Generative Trajectories for Fast Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19348/) (2025)
- [CLASP: Continual Low-rank Adapters for Spatially Placed Concepts from One Hypernetwork](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01331/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized text-to-image diffusion models have grown popular for their ability to efficiently acquire a new concept from user-defined text descriptions and a few images. However, in the real world, a user may wish to personalize a model on multiple concepts but one at a time, with no access to the data from previous concepts due to storage/privacy concerns. When faced with this continual learning (CL) setup, most personalization methods fail to find a balance between acquiring new concepts and retaining previous ones -- a challenge that continual personalization (CP) aims to solve. Inspired by the successful CL methods that rely on class-specific information for regularization, we resort to the inherent class-conditioned density estimates, also known as diffusion classifier (DC) scores, for continual personalization of text-to-image diffusion models. Namely, we propose using DC scores for regularizing the parameter-space and function-space of text-to-image diffusion models, to achieve continual personalization. Using several diverse evaluation setups, datasets, and metrics, we show that our proposed regularization-based CP methods outperform the state-of-the-art C-LoRA, and other baselines. Finally, by operating in the replay-free CL setup and on low-rank adapters, our method incurs zero storage and parameter overhead, respectively, over the state-of-the-art. Our project page: https://srvcodes.github.io/continual_personalization/