# DiffVax: Optimization-Free Image Immunization Against Diffusion-Based Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.17957 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17957/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [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)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01690/) (2020)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Pseudo Numerical Methods for Diffusion Models on Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09778/) (2022)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Universal Image Immunization against Diffusion-based Image Editing via Semantic Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14679/) (2026)
- [GuardDoor: Safeguarding Against Malicious Diffusion Editing via Protective Backdoors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03944/) (2025)
- [Beyond Vulnerabilities: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks as Both Threats and Defenses in Computer Vision Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01845/) (2025)
- [Immune2V: Image Immunization Against Dual-Stream Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10837/) (2026)
- [Anti-Inpainting: A Proactive Defense Approach against Malicious Diffusion-based Inpainters under Unknown Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13023/) (2025)
- [Immunizing Images from Text to Image Editing via Adversarial Cross-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10359/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Attacks for Good: A Survey of Proactive Protection across the Visual Content Lifecycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04314/) (2026)
- [Dual Attention Guided Defense Against Malicious Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14333/) (2025)
- [Position: AI/ML Deepfake Research is Misaligned with AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (AIG-NCII)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18263/) (2026)
- [A Survey on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses for Diffusion Models Across Multiple Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05503/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current image immunization defense techniques against diffusion-based editing embed imperceptible noise into target images to disrupt editing models. However, these methods face scalability challenges, as they require time-consuming optimization for each image separately, taking hours for small batches. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffVax, a scalable, lightweight, and optimization-free framework for image immunization, specifically designed to prevent diffusion-based editing. Our approach enables effective generalization to unseen content, reducing computational costs and cutting immunization time from days to milliseconds, achieving a speedup of 250,000x. This is achieved through a loss term that ensures the failure of editing attempts and the imperceptibility of the perturbations. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our model is scalable, optimization-free, adaptable to various diffusion-based editing tools, robust against counter-attacks, and, for the first time, effectively protects video content from editing. More details are available in https://diffvax.github.io/ .