Broken Memories: Detecting and Mitigating Memorization in Diffusion Models with Degraded Generations
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion foundations and sampling
Abstract (arXiv)
While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images, their tendency to memorize training data poses significant privacy and copyright risks. In this work, we for the first time identify that memorization induces internal numerical instability, often manifesting as visually ``broken'' artifacts. Inspired by stability analysis in numerical methods, we introduce empirical stability regions based on latent update norms to quantitatively characterize stable behavior during generation. Leveraging this, we propose a principled, on-the-fly framework for step-wise detection and adaptive mitigation. Our approach suppresses memorization without altering prompts or guidance, thereby preserving semantic fidelity and image quality. Extensive experiments on Stable Diffusion 1.4 demonstrate that our method achieves an AUC >0.999 detection performance and a 0.0% memorization rate after mitigation with negligible overhead (≈0.01s per image).
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.
Builds on
14 of 41 references.
Closest ancestors · 8
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Why Diffusion Models Don't Memorize: The Role of Implicit Dynamical Regularization in Training23 May
- 2024Understanding and Mitigating Memorization in Generative Models via Sharpness of Probability Landscapes5 Dec
- 2024Classifier-Free Guidance inside the Attraction Basin May Cause Memorization23 Nov
- 2024Exploring Local Memorization in Diffusion Models via Bright Ending Attention29 Oct
- 2024Memorized Images in Diffusion Models share a Subspace that can be Located and Deleted1 Jun
- 2024Unveiling and Mitigating Memorization in Text-to-image Diffusion Models through Cross Attention17 Mar
- 2023Understanding and Mitigating Copying in Diffusion Models31 May
- 2022Pseudo Numerical Methods for Diffusion Models on Manifolds20 Feb
Other references · 6
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,131
- 2021CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioningcited by 2,388
- 2019An Introduction to Variational Autoencoderscited by 997
- 2023A Reproducible Extraction of Training Images from Diffusion Modelscited by 60
- 2025Enhancing Privacy-Utility Trade-offs to Mitigate Memorization in Diffusion Modelscited by 5
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Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Detecting and Mitigating Memorization in Diffusion Models through Anisotropy of the Log-Probability
- 2026Rethinking Memorization Mitigation in Diffusion Models: Reinforcing Text Conditioning
- 2025Does Generation Require Memorization? Creative Diffusion Models using Ambient Diffusion
- 2023Memory in Plain Sight: Surveying the Uncanny Resemblances of Associative Memories and Diffusion Models
- 2024Detecting, Explaining, and Mitigating Memorization in Diffusion Models
- 2026On the Memorization of Consistency Distillation for Diffusion Models
- 2026Memorization In Stable Diffusion Is Unexpectedly Driven by CLIP Embeddings
- 2025Adjusting Initial Noise to Mitigate Memorization in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models