# Latent Space Probing for Adult Content Detection in Video Generative Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00874 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00874/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

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- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
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- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
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- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [Safe Latent Diffusion: Mitigating Inappropriate Degeneration in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05105/) (2022)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18837/) (2025)
- [Unsafe Diffusion: On the Generation of Unsafe Images and Hateful Memes From Text-To-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13873/) (2023)
- [Latent Guard: a Safety Framework for Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08031/) (2024)
- [T2VSafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Text-to-Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05965/) (2024)
- [Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11516/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid proliferation of AI-powered video generation systems has introduced significant challenges in content moderation, particularly with respect to adult and sexually explicit material. Existing detection methods operate on either prompts or decoded pixel-space outputs. Therefore, both approaches are blind to the rich internal representations formed during generation. In this paper, we propose a novel latent space probing framework that intercepts the denoised latent representations produced by the CogVideoX video diffusion model during inference and attaches lightweight classifiers to perform real-time adult content detection. To support this work, we construct a large-scale binary dataset of 11039 ten-second video clips (5086 violating, 5953 non-violating) sourced from adult websites and YouTube respectively. We introduce two lightweight probing classifier architectures. We train and evaluate it on the dataset. Our work demonstrates that latent-space signals encode strong discriminative features for harmful content detection, achieving 97.29% F1 on our held-out test set with an overhead in the 4-6ms range. Our results suggest that probing the latent space results in improvements in both detection performance as well as cost.