# DICE: Disentangling Artist Style from Content via Contrastive Subspace Decomposition in Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08059 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08059/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 32 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2026.

## 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 32)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07345/) (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)
- [Ring-A-Bell! How Reliable are Concept Removal Methods for Diffusion Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10012/) (2023)
- [Glaze: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04222/) (2023)
- [Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09008/) (2023)
- [ZipLoRA: Any Subject in Any Style by Effectively Merging LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13600/) (2023)
- [SneakyPrompt: Jailbreaking Text-to-image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12082/) (2023)
- [One-Dimensional Adapter to Rule Them All: Concepts, Diffusion Models and Erasing Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16145/) (2023)
- [Implicit Style-Content Separation using B-LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14572/) (2024)
- [Receler: Reliable Concept Erasing of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Lightweight Erasers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17717/) (2023)
- [Measuring Style Similarity in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01292/) (2024)
- [EraseAnything: Enabling Concept Erasure in Rectified Flow Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20413/) (2024)
- [Nightshade: Prompt-Specific Poisoning Attacks on Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13828/) (2023)
- [Erasing Undesirable Influence in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05779/) (2024)
- [Localizing and Editing Knowledge in Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13730/) (2023)
- [Precise, Fast, and Low-cost Concept Erasure in Value Space: Orthogonal Complement Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06143/) (2024)
- [SPEED: Scalable, Precise, and Efficient Concept Erasure for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07392/) (2025)
- [Attention Distillation: A Unified Approach to Visual Characteristics Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20235/) (2025)
- [Localized Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Using Training-Free Gated Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12356/) (2025)
- [Erasing More Than Intended? How Concept Erasure Degrades the Generation of Non-Target Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09833/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image diffusion models can reproduce specific artists visual styles at extremely low cost, raising copyright and deployment safety concerns about unauthorized style mimicry. Existing model-side protection methods generally follow ordinary concept erasure, emphasizing aggressive deletion or redirection of target styles. However, our causal intervention analysis shows that the central issue is not insufficient erasure strength, but a mismatch between artist styles and this paradigm: unlike ordinary object concepts, artist styles do not form compact, localized editable semantic units. Consequently, sparse editing and fixed retain lists struggle to suppress target styles while preserving generation utility. We therefore reformulate artist style protection as style purification, suppressing target style expression during inference while preserving the requested content and visual structure. We propose CAPE (Contrastive Artist Style Purification with Eigenbases), a training-free framework against artist style mimicry. CAPE constructs contrastive triplets around the target request and formulates style direction estimation as a generalized eigenvalue problem, capturing style-related directions that remain stable across content variations and are less affected by shared content. During inference, CAPE employs the Adaptive Suppression Controller to assign suppression strengths to different tokens based on Q, K, and V responses, and performs target style suppression on the K and V paths of self-attention. Experimental results show that CAPE effectively weakens target artist characteristics, including brushstrokes, textures, and local color processing, while better preserving major semantic entities, scene composition, and visual structures.