# Prototype-Guided Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08271 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08271/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 49 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [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)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [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)
- [TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11897/) (2023)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [Unified Concept Editing in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14761/) (2023)
- [Ablating Concepts in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13516/) (2023)
- [Training-Free Layout Control with Cross-Attention Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03373/) (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, 1 of 1)

- [Uni-AdaVD: Universal Concept Erasure for Visual Generation via Orthogonal Value Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14521/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Concept erasure is extensively utilized in image generation to prevent text-to-image models from generating undesired content. Existing methods can effectively erase narrow concepts that are specific and concrete, such as distinct intellectual properties (e.g. Pikachu) or recognizable characters (e.g. Elon Musk). However, their performance degrades on broad concepts such as ``sexual'' or ``violent'', whose wide scope and multi-faceted nature make them difficult to erase reliably. To overcome this limitation, we exploit the model's intrinsic embedding geometry to identify latent embeddings that encode a given concept. By clustering these embeddings, we derive a set of concept prototypes that summarize the model's internal representations of the concept, and employ them as negative conditioning signals during inference to achieve precise and reliable erasure. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that our approach achieves substantially more reliable removal of broad concepts while preserving overall image quality, marking a step towards safer and more controllable image generation.