mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Erasing Thousands of Concepts: Towards Scalable and Practical Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

arXiv 2604.16481 ↗First posted 12 Apr 2026cs.CV cs.AIcited by 1

On the map: Diffusion models → Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects

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Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models deliver remarkable visual fidelity but pose safety risks due to their capacity to reproduce undesirable content, such as copyrighted ones. Concept erasure has emerged as a mitigation strategy, yet existing approaches struggle to balance scalability, precision, and robustness, which restricts their applicability to erasing only a few hundred concepts. To address these limitations, we present Erasing Thousands of Concepts (ETC), a scalable framework capable of erasing thousands of concepts while preserving generation quality. Our method first models low-rank concept distributions via a Student's t-distribution Mixture Model (tMM). It enables pin-point erasure of target concepts via affine optimal transport while preserving others by anchoring the boundaries of target concept distributions without pre-defined anchor concepts. We then train a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based module, termed MoEraser, which removes target embeddings while preserving the anchor embeddings. By injecting noise into the text embedding projector and fine-tuning MoEraser for recovery, our framework achieves robustness to white-box attack such as module removal. Extensive experiments on over 2,000 concepts across heterogeneous domains and diffusion models demerate state-of-the-art scalability and precision in large-scale concept erasure.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 8 of its 72 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2026.

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8 of 72 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025SPEED: Scalable, Precise, and Efficient Concept Erasure for Diffusion Models10 Mar
  2. 2023To Generate or Not? Safety-Driven Unlearned Diffusion Models Are Still Easy To Generate Unsafe Images ... For Now18 Oct
  3. 2023Forget-Me-Not: Learning to Forget in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models30 Mar

Other references · 5

  1. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,539
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  3. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  4. 2024Mixtral of Expertscited by 1,785
  5. 2024AlignGuard: Scalable Safety Alignment for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 17

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

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Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
  2. 2024MACE: Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models
  3. 2025A Comprehensive Survey on Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
  4. 2024Precise, Fast, and Low-cost Concept Erasure in Value Space: Orthogonal Complement Matters
  5. 2026Localized Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via High-Level Representation Misdirection
  6. 2025Semantic Surgery: Zero-Shot Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models
  7. 2026Erasing Without Collateral Damage: Precise Concept Removal in Diffusion Models
  8. 2025DyME: Dynamic Multi-Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models with Bi-Level Orthogonal LoRA Adaptation