Now You See It, Now You Don't - Instant Concept Erasure for Safe Text-to-Image and Video Generation
On the map: LLM safety and security → Vision-language and text-to-image safety
Abstract (arXiv)
Robust concept removal for text-to-image (T2I) and text-to-video (T2V) models is essential for their safe deployment. Existing methods, however, suffer from costly retraining, inference overhead, or vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Crucially, they rarely model the latent semantic overlap between the target erase concept and surrounding content -- causing collateral damage post-erasure -- and even fewer methods work reliably across both T2I and T2V domains. We introduce Instant Concept Erasure (ICE), a training-free, modality-agnostic, one-shot weight modification approach that achieves precise, persistent unlearning with zero overhead. ICE defines erase and preserve subspaces using anisotropic energy-weighted scaling, then explicitly regularises against their intersection using a unique, closed-form overlap projector. We pose a convex and Lipschitz-bounded Spectral Unlearning Objective, balancing erasure fidelity and intersection preservation, that admits a stable and unique analytical solution. This solution defines a dissociation operator that is translated to the model's text-conditioning layers, making the edit permanent and runtime-free. Across targeted removals of artistic styles, objects, identities, and explicit content, ICE efficiently achieves strong erasure with improved robustness to red-teaming, all while causing only minimal degradation of original generative abilities in both T2I and T2V models.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Vision-language and text-to-image safety, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 59 of its 81 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.
Builds on
59 of 81 references.
Closest ancestors · 15
Same direction, newest first
- 2025T2VUnlearning: A Concept Erasing Method for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models23 May
- 2025CURE: Concept Unlearning via Orthogonal Representation Editing in Diffusion Models19 May
- 2024SAFREE: Training-Free and Adaptive Guard for Safe Text-to-Image And Video Generation16 Oct
- 2024SteerDiff: Steering towards Safe Text-to-Image Diffusion Models3 Oct
- 2024Unlearning Concepts from Text-to-Video Diffusion Models19 Jul
- 2024Direct Unlearning Optimization for Robust and Safe Text-to-Image Models17 Jul
- 2024Automatic Jailbreaking of the Text-to-Image Generative AI Systems26 May
- 2024ART: Automatic Red-teaming for Text-to-Image Models to Protect Benign Users24 May
- 2024Unlearning Concepts in Diffusion Model via Concept Domain Correction and Concept Preserving Gradient24 May
- 2024Defensive Unlearning with Adversarial Training for Robust Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models24 May
- 2023To Generate or Not? Safety-Driven Unlearned Diffusion Models Are Still Easy To Generate Unsafe Images ... For Now18 Oct
- 2023Ring-A-Bell! How Reliable are Concept Removal Methods for Diffusion Models?16 Oct
3 more
Other references · 44
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,588
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,777
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,550
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,549
- 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,082
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,718
- 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,564
- 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,339
- 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,785
- 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,141
- 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 3,605
- 2021CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioningcited by 2,407
32 more
- 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformercited by 2,218
- 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,775
- 2022Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,768
- 2022Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 1,174
- 2022Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformercited by 990
- 2023Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Modelscited by 535
- 2022Safe Latent Diffusion: Mitigating Inappropriate Degeneration in Diffusion Modelscited by 509
- 2021Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Modelscited by 462
- 2023Unified Concept Editing in Diffusion Modelscited by 384
- 2023SalUn: Empowering Machine Unlearning via Gradient-based Weight Saliency in Both Image Classification and Generationcited by 384
- 2023LAVIE: High-Quality Video Generation with Cascaded Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 349
- 2021Gradient Projection Memory for Continual Learningcited by 344
- 2023Ablating Concepts in Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 316
- 2024MACE: Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Modelscited by 303
- 2020Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overviewcited by 209
- 2023MMA-Diffusion: MultiModal Attack on Diffusion Modelscited by 193
- 2023Selective Amnesia: A Continual Learning Approach to Forgetting in Deep Generative Modelscited by 177
- 2023One-Dimensional Adapter to Rule Them All: Concepts, Diffusion Models and Erasing Applicationscited by 169
- 2023Editing Implicit Assumptions in Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 129
- 2023Receler: Reliable Concept Erasing of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Lightweight Eraserscited by 120
- 2023Circumventing Concept Erasure Methods For Text-to-Image Generative Modelscited by 84
- 2023Self-Discovering Interpretable Diffusion Latent Directions for Responsible Text-to-Image Generationcited by 69
- 2024T2VSafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Text-to-Video Generative Modelscited by 66
- 2024Machine Unlearning in Generative AI: A Surveycited by 49
- 2024Precise, Fast, and Low-cost Concept Erasure in Value Space: Orthogonal Complement Matterscited by 39
- 2024SafeSora: Towards Safety Alignment of Text2Video Generation via a Human Preference Datasetcited by 35
- 2023Continual Learning with Scaled Gradient Projectioncited by 34
- 2024Robust Concept Erasure Using Task Vectorscited by 27
- 2025Concept Pinpoint Eraser for Text-to-image Diffusion Models via Residual Attention Gatecited by 16
- 2024Espresso: Robust Concept Filtering in Text-to-Image Modelscited by 14
- 2024SAP: Corrective Machine Unlearning with Scaled Activation Projection for Label Noise Robustnesscited by 10
- 2024Ethical-Lens: Curbing Malicious Usages of Open-Source Text-to-Image Modelscited by 4
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026VII: Visual Instruction Injection for Jailbreaking Image-to-Video Generation Modelscited by 7
- 2026HEART: Hyperspherical Embedding Alignment via Kent-Representation Traversal in Diffusion Modelscited by 0
- 2026Motion Concept Unlearning in Video Diffusion Modelscited by 0
- 2026FADE: Frame-Aware Diffusion-Transformer-based Multi-Concept Erasure for Video Unlearningcited by 0
- 2026FADE: Frame-Aware Diffusion-Transformer-based Multi-Concept Erasure for Video Unlearning2 Oct 2026
- 2026Motion Concept Unlearning in Video Diffusion Models29 Sep 2026
- 2026HEART: Hyperspherical Embedding Alignment via Kent-Representation Traversal in Diffusion Models8 May 2026
- 2026VII: Visual Instruction Injection for Jailbreaking Image-to-Video Generation Models24 Feb 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey on Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
- 2026CleanVideo: Adaptive Concept Erasure for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models
- 2026Erasing Thousands of Concepts: Towards Scalable and Practical Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
- 2026Concept Score Relearning: A Unified Cross-Architecture Attack on Concept Erasure
- 2025Erasing Concepts, Steering Generations: A Comprehensive Survey of Concept Suppression
- 2025Rethinking the Vulnerability of Concept Erasure and a New Method
- 2026TEA: Text Encoder Alignment for Robust Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Models
- 2025Semantic Surgery: Zero-Shot Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models