# Now You See It, Now You Don't - Instant Concept Erasure for Safe Text-to-Image and Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18684 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18684/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Vision-language and text-to-image safety](https://mlsanity.com/safety/vision-language-and-text-to-image-safety/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07345/) (2023)
- [Safe Latent Diffusion: Mitigating Inappropriate Degeneration in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05105/) (2022)
- [Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08877/) (2021)
- [Unified Concept Editing in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14761/) (2023)
- [SalUn: Empowering Machine Unlearning via Gradient-based Weight Saliency in Both Image Classification and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12508/) (2023)
- [LAVIE: High-Quality Video Generation with Cascaded Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15103/) (2023)
- [Gradient Projection Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09762/) (2021)
- [Ablating Concepts in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13516/) (2023)
- [MACE: Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06135/) (2024)
- [Forget-Me-Not: Learning to Forget in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17591/) (2023)
- [Red-Teaming the Stable Diffusion Safety Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04610/) (2022)
- [Ring-A-Bell! How Reliable are Concept Removal Methods for Diffusion Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10012/) (2023)
- [To Generate or Not? Safety-Driven Unlearned Diffusion Models Are Still Easy To Generate Unsafe Images ... For Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11868/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [VII: Visual Instruction Injection for Jailbreaking Image-to-Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20999/) (2026)
- [FADE: Frame-Aware Diffusion-Transformer-based Multi-Concept Erasure for Video Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03980/) (2026)
- [HEART: Hyperspherical Embedding Alignment via Kent-Representation Traversal in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07973/) (2026)
- [Motion Concept Unlearning in Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36832/) (2026)

## 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.